Wrapping up our roundtable on Eddie Campbell’s Alec comics here at HU, we present to you an extended conversation with Mr. Campbell himself about work, life, and fate.
The interview was conducted via email during the course of the past two weeks or so. It focused primarily on the Alec comics as collected in The Years Have Pants (2009), so all page references, whether unspecified or in the context of individual stories, are to the pagination of that book. Except for when we talk about Campbell’s most recent personal book Fate of the Artist (2006), which is not included in Pants. I should note that Caroline Small (Caro) graciously stepped in at the eleventh hour and formulated a couple of incisive questions about that book that I couldn’t have come up with myself. They have been inserted near the end.
My thanks to Mr. Campbell for taking the time and for helping out so promptly with edits and images. ‘Nuff said!
Authenticity
At the beginning of How to Be an Artist you write with a certain amount of irony, but fundamentally seriously, “I will only lie in the service of truth.” This seems to me a good starting point for discussing your autobiographical work, since Alec clearly has had a complex and evolving approach to truth, with the issue perhaps most clearly articulated in Fate of the Artist. What is your truth in autobiography?
Firstly, let’s dispense with ‘autobiography.’ I felt uncomfortable when that word crept into comics, and even more so with the more recent ‘memoir,’ which I believe arrived with [Alison Bechdel’s] Fun Home. In the contract of fiction a storyteller says ‘let’s make believe’ to his audience. Let’s make believe there’s a person named Alec MacGarry. If the outline of this character’s life largely resembles my own, that’s interesting, but it doesn’t mean we’re no longer ‘making believe.’ And just to remind you where we are, let’s make believe he makes a bargain with the deity Fate, who allows him three wishes. The “I will only lie in the service of truth” is just a variant on “Every word I tell you will be true. It happened long ago…” It’s just opening the door. It’s part of the storyteller’s craft. I’m looking at two books on my shelf. One is The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd, and the other is The Collected Stories of O. Henry. I’d put my book beside the O. Henry.
I understand, but you’re still working in a reality-based register with your Alec comics, no? And at least in the case of How to Be an Artist there must have been documentary concerns, since it concerns in part an extended number of public figures in the comics world. I guess that what I’m interested in is your way of negotiating material that is in large part lived with your wish to craft a story, and the reason I’m asking is because reality-based material has been so central to the development of comics in the past few decades – a notion of, or at least a feeling for, truth must be essential to it, as you indicate.
Okay. First thing that springs to mind here is The Salon by Nick Bertozzi, and I can’t recall where I read this, in an interview somewhere, but while he was interested in Picasso and Braque and the story of Cubism, he felt that more was needed for a ‘graphic novel,’ and so he introduced this magic absinthe idea, or whatever it was, but it was a supernatural element. I was so disappointed; I mean not in the work itself, but in that there was a presumption that comics can’t function without a super-element. As though you couldn’t find enough daftness for cartooning purposes in among Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and that whole nutty circle without needing to bring in supernatural stuff.
In my own case I was dealing with a much smaller event, the ‘graphic novel’s’ first crash and burn in the early 1990s, and there certainly wasn’t any need to make things up to keep it interesting. Just figuring it all out was enough of a feast. A good storyteller can make a banquet out of much less than what was on offer in that case. But I think comics are mostly dealing with a very immature taste among its readers. There was a fellow pitching an idea at San Diego, and I can’t remember why he was pitching it to me, perhaps I was listening just to be polite, but he started ‘There are these vampires—‘. I cut him off. ‘Stop! I’m bored already.’ There’s only one vampire I have time for and that’s the Count on Sesame Street.
How to Be an Artist could have been done as a complete fiction quite literally, except it would have taken five times as long to do. Referring to real artists living and dead really wasn’t what it was supposed to be about. That was just an extra sheen. Fictitiously I wanted to create a sense of a lot of names and styles, and some of these would appear once and never be heard of again, some would recur, and others would become significant players in the drama, while others yet again would be established as a category of ‘old masters’ that could be referred to almost in the prayers of the protagonist (King, Herriman, Caniff). In fact there is a sense that Drake, in my epilogue, is the last of these old masters to pass away (even though he isn’t literally – Feiffer is still alive – but my point is that the reader should think of it as fiction).
Also, I was thinking about Tolkien and the way there are names that exist in the mythology of Middle-Earth, and also the way some of these characters are about to enter into that realm, like Galadriel, if I’m remembering it correctly, it’s been a long time (I adored the Silmarillion). Like Tolkien, I wanted to establish a dense mythology, but in a very short space. And on top of that, the effect I wanted, is that this is what the artistic environment is made up of. In fact it’s what life is like. School, work, etc. At first there is a crowd, and in time individuals stand out, and there are departed individuals that are only ever referred to and are never met, and in time you may become a significant figure yourself as you achieve credit for your actions. The novice has to negotiate his way down a populated road.
I could have made up a lot of stuff, names and titles of their works, like Eisner did in The Dreamer, but why cheat the reader of an extra layer to the work? And you could do the same thing for a musical environment, or art of any sort. So rather than ‘drop names’ as one critic has said, it was necessary to represent each occurrence of such a personage in my story by showing an image from his work. And then, so that this didn’t seem like an arbitrary art-book thing, I challenged myself to find an image that commented on what was actually happening at the exact point in the story into which it was being inserted. It works as often as not. So anybody just skipping those panels because they’re not interested in that artist, is missing the meaning of the scheme. An average reader, I have discovered, is only willing to recognize a limited number of characters, six or seven or whatever, and I’m sure somebody somewhere has tabulated it. Beyond that they tend to complain.
So just pretend they’re made up. Although, as it happens, a lot of those old masters are in print now, who weren’t when I drew my book, so maybe a lot of that stuff is less obscure than it might have been. And Umberto Eco in his Queen Loana used a lot more obscure stuff than I ever did…. There was a moment when my confidence in what I was up to threatened to fail, but I came across a couple of quotes that shored up my resolve. The first was “Literary history is a modern invention and so is the automatic sense which a modern writer must have of his location in the flow of literary time.” The full thing is on page 249 of my book. It encouraged me to believe I was on the right track. The other one relates to Alan Moore’s position in the story. When I knew I was going to end with the Big Numbers fiasco, and I knew from the start, I started working in allusions to chaos theory, and then I stumbled upon that great paragraph from R.G. Collingwood “The same instability which affects the life of the individual artist reappears in the history of art taken as a whole…” He glimpsed the fractal idea way back in 1924. I had to put the whole quote in there.
Anyway, there was an investigative angle to How to Be an Artist. Why do these things fail? Art in the bigger sense, and the artist’s life as a microcosm of that. And since it was my intention to find useful answers to these questions, there was no room for making things up. Even if I’d changed a name it would have ruptured the fragile fabric of it. Apart from MacGarry of course, but by that time everybody accepts that as a metaphor for ‘Okay, make yourself comfortable and I’ll tell you a story.’
I watched The King’s Speech last night. Good movie, and it’s amazing that a story about a guy overcoming his stammer gets to be Picture of the Year, but a few things niggled as being implausible, and when I looked into it, sure enough, those were the parts of the story that were tweaked ‘for dramatic effect.’ In movie-making there’s a presumption, in fact it appears to be a commandment, that ‘there can be no drama without conflict,’ and so conflict has to be manufactured where it can’t be found growing naturally. I’m referring in this case to the depiction of King Edward, who has to be made somewhat unlikable for the purpose of making George look good. In another story it’s easy to make Edward’s story the love story of the century. He gave up his throne for the love of a woman. But here he’s an air-headed Champagne Charlie who mocks his brother’s speech impediment. That’s the movies for you. As soon as I see the cheap mechanisms at work, it tends to weaken my willingness to suspend disbelief. (Lest you assume I’m against movies per se, there are some that I do have an enduring fondness for: prime Laurel and Hardy, such as Blockheads from 1938, Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not, Jules Dassin’s Rififi, and many more, none of which are based on real events.)
Before we leave the notion of autobiography behind, I wanted to ask about your distinction between that term and what you are doing – isn’t all autobiography, even as commonly understood, a kind of storytelling? Does the term seem to constrictive for what you’re trying to do?
After I sent you my previous I thought to myself, what was I trying to say there? My point I think, if I were to finish circling around it, would be that I resent mechanical interference in narrative configurations that occur naturally. What attracted me to real life events in the first place was that they always happened in ways that didn’t fit my preconceived notions of narrative logic, arrived at by years of reading books and comics and watching movies. When I first started thinking about this I’d take bits of business that I’d observed in real life and then fit them into my work. But later I’d resent the damage I had to do to the observed moment to make it fit in. There are non-obtrusive things you can do, like juxtaposition, or a bit of careful pruning can help nature along. And a short story doesn’t need to arrive at a snappy conclusion. Even as recently as the new stuff in the The Years Have Pants there are a couple of places where my interfering hand may have gone too far. Hatfield and Fischer’s ‘tiny fragments’ theory is a useful reference here. Sometimes the preciousness of the found moment is best preserved by keeping it along with other found moments and not trying too hard to connect them.
Regarding autobiography, yes it is a kind of storytelling. It’s just that I consider it the shelf of people who have done important things in the world. And ‘memoir’ by definition means looking back, which is not always what I’m doing. And a diarist is recording the days in order one after another as they happen. All of these are literary terms. Something bugs me about this, and what I’m trying to say will probably occur to me after you send your next question.
Right, I definitely see what you’re saying about found moments. In Graffiti Kitchen, however, you have this line “I am the only element of continuity in my own life”, which you end up subverting as an egotistical conceit, but which still remains what seems a certain statement of purpose. Making sense of one’s life, one seeks continuities, and reading the Alec comics in their entirety, this seems a driving principle. Would you agree?
I have to keep on answering for the egotistical blather of that young whippersnapper, Eddie Campbell. That’s my problem right there. I realize now that at the beginning of our exchange I was attempting to express my current aesthetic position, which is inevitably going to make me contradict myself, if the younger me still has a voice. If that amounts to continuity then so be it.
Thinking about my impasse in my previous response, I’m remembering that I have always been striving to get back to a more immediate kind of story-telling. I mean telling of an oral sort. Talking. In talking, one simply begins ‘I heard,’ or ‘do you know who I bumped into’, or ‘I was reading about this woman…’ (naturally establishing ‘I’ as the author and motivator of the anecdote.) However, the writing of fiction, and autobiography for that matter, involves this whole other formal way of going about things, such as: “From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that the light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.”
I can see how in that first book, The King Canute Crowd, I was trying to do that very thing with “Danny Grey never really forgave himself for leaving Alec MacGarry asleep at the turnpike”; all this creating characters and putting them in a very particular time and place. I think I’ve been wrestling with trying to defeat this aura of the literary ever since. I feel that it’s a formal screen erected between speaker and listener. On this subject, I greatly enjoyed [Michael] Chabon’s recent Maps and Legends. It’s a collection of essays I suppose, or at least that’s how it would have to be described, but it’s really all of a piece, and it involves talking about stories and telling stories. And in it I feel that he was talking directly to me without that formal thing between us, that contract of ‘Let’s make believe…’, that same situation which is where I placed myself at the beginning of this chat, which started two days ago but is probably only eight inches above here. And since the tension between one mode and the other is exacerbating my paragraphs here, maybe it’s the same tension that gives a certain frisson to my better comics, that setting up of a literary pretension and then its casual deflation.
Literature and art
In your discussions of the graphic novel you’ve raised the term ‘literary’ as a defining aspect. I take it you mean literary as a register, rather than specifically text-oriented. How are comics literature?
If you go back to where you found that reference, you’ll probably find that I was representing Will Eisner’s original intention. When Eisner used the word ‘novel’ he was alluding to literariness rather than to a ‘prose work of more than 70,000 words’ (as science fiction societies that give out awards like to define a novel). And by literariness he meant seriousness of meaning, and a book that stays on a bookshelf as opposed to a periodical that gets thrown out after its use-by date. (Curiously, a book-writer I recently encountered was nonplussed upon observing that comics now stay on the shelf forever, no matter how awful they are whereas regular books have their moment in the daylight, get remaindered and are never seen again outside of garage-sales.)
On the other hand, when I used ‘literary’ above I meant it in the sense of written as opposed to spoken (and spoken here meaning straight from brain to tongue, not reading aloud a prepared speech as in the movie mentioned above). The three-panel gag comic can still be very close to the spontaneous, to the told joke, or to the scurrilous caricature sketched on the outhouse wall. A short comic book can still be analogous to, or a rendition of, a memorized tale. But to spin a comic out for a hundred pages (or even 48 pages, as in Graffiti Kitchen, or all of the stories in [Eisner’s] A Contract With God) and do it successfully (by which I mean it holds the attention of a ‘reader’), involves a kind of long-range planning that can only be arrived at by ‘writing.’ (In the same way, the symphony could only have been conceived in an era of written music, and at some point in its evolution, The Iliad shifted from an oral tradition to a written one (As M. L. West demonstrates in his magisterial The Making of the Iliad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; ”…at some point Homer wrote down or dictated his material, and in the course of years or decades he composed the vast panorama of The Iliad, expanding his early draft…”)
I could draw a large number of images, as say for instance Picasso does obsessively in his ‘Artist and Model’ series of Dec ‘53/ Jan ‘54, in an improvised, purely mind-to-hand way, or as Al Columbia did equally obsessively in his recent Pim and Francie, but something like The Arrival by Shaun Tan, even though it has no words in it, is a book complicated enough (this is not a qualitative argument) that at some point in its evolution, it would have required a written plan, even if the writing consisted entirely of hieroglyphs that neither you nor I could interpret.
In this way, comics become a kind of literature if we do not intend that to mean that they now reside on Parnassus, as a fellow comics practitioner seemed to be presuming was my intention on a panel, a few years ago, for which I had pre-proposed the subject “Will the literature of the future have pictures?” ‘Comics are not literature, they are comics!’, he declared emphatically at the outset, leaving us wondering where the discussion could go next. (This was not at a comics event, but at a writer’s festival, which was casting a sidelight on the ‘graphic novel’ phenomenon, and so the literary angle opened a potential channel of connection.)
And would you say that comics as literature in this sense is constituent of your conception of the graphic novel? Clearly it is not the only criterion, and I know you’ve more or less disavowed the term because of its dissolution in the market, but is it salvageable, and what role would this literary aspect play for it?
An artist usually wants to be part of something bigger than himself, but ‘the graphic novel’ no longer seems like any kind of worthwhile aspiration to me. Nor does the prose novel for that matter. My thinking has been floating adrift for some time. I’m working hard on a new book, but I don’t think of it as being part of any current dialogue. Maybe I’ll come out of that and see everything in a different way.
In your foreword to the collected edition you write that part 1 of The King Canute Crowd was where you found your artistic voice, and that’s precisely the story that starts with that line “Danny Grey never really forgave himself for leaving Alec MacGarry asleep at the turnpike.” It’s a very ‘literary’ opening as you say (and a very fine one, if you ask me), but in some ways it feels more poetically wrought than your graphics – the generally large grid, the preference for medium- and long shots, and the general lack of dynamic panel layouts; the sketchy, notational drawing style, etc. The continuity between that through your current work makes a lot of sense to me, but I’m curious as to how you’ve refined this ‘voice.’
It takes a long time and a great effort to cut away all the dead wood and get things as straightforward and simple as you describe. The first thing that had to go was everything that was cinematic. Next, anything that looked like comic books, and most comic book readers are not even aware of the peculiar pictorial syntax of comic books, the way characters stand in a panel in relation to each other and in relation to the frame and the way word balloons sit in a panel unrelated to everything else in there. ‘Panel layouts’ is a term I haven’t used in a long time. It’s a comic book term, like ‘nine panel grid’; ‘medium shot’ and ‘long shot’ are cinematic terms. I threw all of this stuff out of my vocabulary long ago. They’re part of the dead wood. In an early attempt to start the book, the characters had the slightly enlarged heads of a cartoony style. That had to go too. To have repeated it in panel 2 would have been the makings of a ‘style.’
I read an art instructional book once, I can’t remember who wrote it, but I extracted a valuable lesson from it. That is, that an artist should spend his artistic career expunging from the work everything that he recognizes as a habit. If he finds a neat way of doing something, instead of using the trick again, he must refrain from ever doing so. He must cast it out. A particular brushstroke or a figural gesture, or whatever. Comic books are entirely made up of this sort of thing. I have a pal who loved the way Berni Wrightson drew the strings of saliva stretched between upper and lower teeth, so he borrowed the device and still uses it forty years later. Wrightson himself got it from Graham Ingels, and he may have invented it or got it from somebody else, perhaps the face of a witch in the illustration in an old book of fairy tales from the turn of the nineteenth century. So this ugly device has been perpetuated through several generations, perhaps a whole century. Acquiring an artistic voice should be a subtractive process. Get rid of everything that you recognize as a device, or an aspect of style. Try to have no style, to go beyond the idea of a style. And what’s left will be your own voice, which you can never properly recognize, and then get rid of that too. Transform yourself. The book didn’t go that far. I’m extrapolating now.
It seems to me, however, that there is still a stylistic choice involved – the stories are very determined by the narration, sustaining the notational aspect of the drawing and leaving less room for images of a more independently evocative nature. Such drawings as the silent one in chapter seven of How to Be an Artist (p. 258 in Pants) where your brother plays clarinet from the basement window of your building are few and far between. I assume there’s a conscious choice involved here, perhaps having to do with reflexive tenor of the narration?
I had to go back and check that because I remember I was consciously avoiding silent panels by that time. In going for a verticality, I’ve pushed the caption dangerously high up there so that in a quick reappraisal you’ve overlooked it.
Argh! How did I manage simultaneously to read and overlook that caption?
…In fact I’ve broken one of my own rules about caption placement and suddenly feel embarrassed. I shall seize upon one aspect of your question and surge ahead. Looking at it now, I feel that I was resorting to a cheap cliché there. I had decided by then that silent panels were a gimmick that belong in the Eisner-Steranko school of comics art, in which analogous techniques are found for representing time and sound (or its sudden absence). You can certainly find passages like that in the King Canute Crowd, such as page 93:
…or in close proximity, page 101. But at the time I drew those pages I would have been incapable of something as complicated as the Big Numbers fiasco (pages 305-310, or “OUCH!” on pages 468-471:
…or speaking of the wispily poetic, the graveyard sojourn on pages 569-570. For everything gained, some other thing must be abandoned).
I always felt that my challenge was to make my little paper characters live in the reader’s mind. Too handsome images can be a distraction. When I read Gasoline Alley, I always prefer the workaday dailies. The Sundays sometimes interrupt my suspension of disbelief just by being so stylistically interesting.
I guess what struck me about that panel was that it was uncharacteristically ‘poetic’, as if you for once ease your grip and let the drawing resonate.
You’re forgetting that the crux of How to Be an Artist, the hinge upon which the whole book turns to face its conclusion, is an extremely poetic moment, both verbally and pictorially (since you are separating the elements here). Beginning with the third and final lapse of faith in the bargain made with Fate (the crushing void of space around MacGarry in that central panel on page 294) with Skeezix, Terry Lee and Krazy Kat then all doing walk-ons (‘walk’ literally, compare the motifs in pan 2 and pan 9 of page 295), with MacGarry by contrast dormant until Fate animates his rigid form by dripping molten silver on his head from a Coconino moon (while he is sleeping at the turnpike no less).
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that there was no poetry in your work – the poetry is one of the reasons I like it so much! It was merely that that particular panel in that sequence seemed uncharacteristic in context and therefore stood out, prompting my inquiry.
We’ll rub a hole in that panel if we pay it any more attention. :)
[Laughs] I definitely see what you mean about cliché though, but then in After the Snooter you have a couple of silent passages when you slip into internal, symbolic sequences. This seems a departure from your earlier work, and anticipates some of the choices you make in Fate of the Artist. Could you talk about your motivations for this?
There are always going-backs of course, reversions to see if I missed something. I’m always wrestling with problems on the conceptual level of the art of making a comic strip. Sometimes I follow a thought as far as it can go. I come up against a block and have to trot back to an earlier position and pick up the thread.
I’m talking about my best work there, the Alec books. Otherwise, I can get all that old-fashioned action stuff out of my system by doing a book like Batman: The Order of Beasts, or The Black Diamond Detective Agency. But with my personal books, I’m trying to be pure.
On the other hand, looking through Pants I’ve just fastened on a panel relevant to the discussion of silent panels. Panel 6 on page 618:
…one of the new pages drawn for the book. I drew that thing several times, and it even had a caption at one point. But there it is frozen in its silent glory. Alec opens a tough bag of sweets at the cinema. A rare instance when I appear to have done a whole page just to set up that silent panel.
Worth capturing
Those sequences in Snooter are dealing with inner life, in this case semi-awake dreaming I guess, in a fairly expressive manner:
This is something you hadn’t done all that much of before in the Alec stories, which leads to a more basic question: with a few notable exceptions – parts of Graffiti Kitchen and Fate of the Artist – you seem to avoid addressing moments of strong emotion, preferring to suggest your character’s emotional life subtly in his narration and, in the images, through observation – I’m thinking here in particular about the retrospective undercurrent and lingering despair in the margins of Snooter. This runs counter to a lot of comics autobiography where the extremes of their author’s experience often take center stage. What are your thoughts on this?
Of course, I’m Scottish, as you know, and we don’t do emotion. I’m reserving the emotional thing for some real catastrophe (there might be some raw emotion in my book about money that I’m working on). All through this endeavor I’ve had the idea that by the end of it I would like to have covered the whole spectrum of life in our times. I don’t mean I want to dig into all the dark corners of experience. I’ll leave that to Alan. But rather that the commonplace life is a thing worth capturing. That’s why I referenced Gasoline Alley in my introduction. What is interesting about life at 20, at 40, at 50? etc. In theory anyway, it’s a goal. I often have readers say they liked The King Canute Crowd, but that things tend to slope off after that. Then they come back after a few years and say they missed half of what The Snooter was about the first time around. Which is another reason why I avoid making up stuff, since I need the work to hang around for a long time. The bogus parts look pretty obvious after a few years.
Purity or not, your prose style is so distinct, and I find passages not only in the earlier work, but in After the Snooter that seem to me fully as wrought as the “turnpike” line. This is not a criticism – I think it is part of what makes your storytelling voice so compelling, this intermittently poetic, if also often straightforward or ironic, approach to the mundane. Any thoughts on this?
Just yesterday I took a few lines out of the thing I’m working on, because they sounded just like the self-conscious Alec MacGarry narration of the Canute years. It took me a few minutes to figure out that that’s what was bothering me about them. There’s nothing like hearing my lines quoted back at me, as my wife often does, to make me go off them very quickly. The ones I’m happiest with are usually phrases that I dropped by accident when I was in the right mood. A lot of my stuff does look caption-heavy when you skim through the book, but it would be difficult to reduce any of it. It’s all contributing vital information. If Alan had used captions in From Hell we could have wrapped the job up in nine months.
It’s not so much that the use of captions feels heavy to me, but rather that they tend to steer the narrative considerably more than the images, which accent, deepen or provide counterpoint. Is there some sense that the images, left to their own, would risk skewing the narrative toward a more ‘seductive’ register? In some ways, Fate takes more risks in this respect.
Yes, Fate is my only personal book where I let single pictures fill up whole pages. Other than that however, way back in the 1970s I felt that comic books had become these fat ugly things that wallowed in bad drawing. I rejected them then and I do so even more vehemently now. At that same time I discovered the old strips of Noel Sickles and Roy Crane. (Matt Seneca’s review of the Buz Sawyer reprint at The Comics Journal yesterday just reminded me of this: “During the frequent artistic high points, the panels are suffused in a glossy, bracingly realistic natural light…”) And I thought that this was a whole other thing entirely, and I wanted to work in that idiom, with the small compact black and white drawings, but with this great sense of real sunlight created with the doubletone board technique.
So I developed my own version of that (in the King Canute Crowd), using letratones. Putting the stuff on flat tended to kill dead any sense of light, so I cut the stuff up into fragments, letting the scraps lie at odd angles to each other. Panels 5 and 6 on page 77:
…are good examples of what I was trying to do, where I step out of the narrative for a second and enjoy the mist rising on a May Sunday morning. But it’s not obvious. I don’t make a big deal of it, but those are two little panels that succeed in taking me to another place when I look at them now. Elsewhere I might have dwelt on it more consciously, for instance the bottom panel of page 404 in The Dance of Lifey Death is a little contemplation of nature running wild under Alec’s house. If you follow the gradations of tone on the wooden fence slats, you might be pictorially astute enough to notice that I have spread out my entire range of tones from 100% black through 90%, 80%, etc down to 0 at far right.
On the whole, the reader is always aware of a hand making a drawing. It’s never reduced to the hieroglyphic manner of Nancy or some of the other newspaper funnies, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the reader is always aware of a hands-on event taking place. There are many places where I’ve done a whole scene because I wanted to draw one thing, but I usually disguise my intention. I’d feel terribly vulgar if a reader thought ‘ah, there’s the money shot!’
Your visual-verbal register is, I guess, largely an attempt at realism, but your use of letratone makes me think of the way comics historically have often achieved naturalistic effect through abstraction – the dark winter sky in Canute on p. 51, for example, or the Vermont landscape in The Dance of Lifey Death, on p. 370, are fairly abstract suggestions of real phenomena.
I suppose you feel your way towards an equilibrium between such instances and more barebones linework, or images making direct of symbolic imagery to illustrate concepts, and I guess the use of color and the opening up of the images in Fate was a challenge to whatever equilibrium you had built? Comics seem to accommodate a fairly wide range of approaches without too much difficulty, but it still can’t be easy to make things cohere seamlessly.
Having set my course I have to keep coming up with little pictures and every one of them has to be different from all the little pictures that have preceded it. And every page has to say something that hasn’t already been said. The techniques used in Fate certainly point me in a new direction. My next book in the autobiographical mode, if we are agreeing to call it that, is in colour and I’m producing it mostly on the computer.
I wanted to ask you about irony. It’s a big part of your humor and, consequently, your self-representation. It seems to me a risky approach when striving for authenticity, and it is, I’m sure, hard to control how people take it?
I don’t think of irony consciously, but I do scrutinize my writing like it’s a legal document before I let it go. Does this phrase leave me open to such and such an interpretation, does that one contradict my earlier position, does this other one cut the matter finely enough? I’ll tweak it to add a mischievous note, but over-tweaking introduces the danger of a formality creeping in. I see that in my old blog when I find myself re-reading parts of it. One’s audience is so widespread nowadays, and its educational status widely varied, that pinning down all the possible misinterpretations can wind up piling extra hours onto the job. I also find that humor itself is complicated. I know well-educated people who have a very primitive sense of humor.
But it’s one of those things where people always think it’s the other person who hasn’t got it. I read a review of Fate of the Artist, which emphatically declared that Honeybee was not funny in the least. Since it was essential that it should be funny, being the work of A. Humorist, whose ironic tale ends the whole shebang, I obviously wasn’t getting five stars from him. In fact, I think of myself specifically as a humorist, but I so often find myself out of tune with what passes for humor today. Myself, I can sit through a half hour (well I can’t literally) of stand-up comedy in a wretched state of dismay. I understand that to amuse a room full of average citizens requires sticking to a very obvious line of quips. If there were fewer of these citizens you could just get them on the floor and tickle them I suppose.
It seems clear that a lot of your work derives quite directly from oral joke- or storytelling, not the least the gag strip. Why do you consider that in some ways quite strongly determined format to work better for your representation of daily life than the literary register that you seek to purge from your work?
Did I say purge? These things change from phase to phase. With the Snooter book, which appeared piecemeal as it was being drawn, I wanted to have it both ways, which is to say that I wanted the spontaneous quality of ‘something funny happened today,’ like you get from [James] Kochalka’s diary comics, in the way that James studiously avoids any hint of continuity. I wanted to do that but also have a big mosaic of pieces at the end of it. So going in I had no idea how or if it would end, except that a storyteller worth his salt always finds a way of wrapping things up before closing time.
Anyway, my point is that there is a quality about improvising humour from day to day that can’t be manufactured in a looking-back kind of way. But at the same time, interspersed among that, I was looking back at childhood memory for about thirty pages if you add them all up. I hadn’t done childhood before that, I mean from the inside, first person, if you think about it, except for a brief one-page interlude in The King Canute book.
Another thing about oral storytelling; whenever I’m put in the position of giving advice to a student comics artist, I always say, tell your story orally to one or more people first. That way you’ll quickly figure out how the ‘timing’ needs to work. Then when you draw it you have to figure out something that is graphically analogous to real timing. There’s one page, in the ‘Fragments’ section of the Pants book, which appeared in The Australian newspaper’s magazine section in the week that the Melbourne Writer’s festival was giving the ‘graphic novel’ a guest-spot. The editor is a lady who interviewed me for a huge big tabloid profile-spread ten years ago and figured I could do a colour page for her that would fit the requirements and subject. Anyway, time was tight and I had to call back in a few hours and tell my piece over the phone, which is unnerving, as you can’t see how it’s going down, and there was a nice piece of cash involved. ‘That’ll work’ she said and I was in. So oral storytelling is a useful skill apart from being an aesthetic position.
High/Low
Stepping back a bit: you’ve emphasized often enough your interest in early modern cartooning and the visual-verbal vernacular it developed, and it’s clear that your work is informed by it. At the same time, of course, Alec is clearly a project with high art connotations. What is your take on the dissolution of modernity’s hierarchical structures of high and low culture and what’s the potential of comics in that context, now that they are increasingly integrating high art registers?
The problem with the dissolution of the high/low hierarchy is that it’s been replaced by communities. And each community goes to great lengths to define itself and repel boarders. So they establish definitions. Thus you find, last week when Shaun Tan’s film won an Oscar, on The Beat’s news site:
“Whatever you thought of the hosts, the win in the Best Animated Short Film for Shaun Tan …was a nice win for a very talented artist. Although the Australian Tan is more of an illustrator than a cartoonist, his best known work, THE ARRIVAL, is certainly an example of graphic storytelling — so if he isn’t exactly on our team, he’s pretty darned close.”
So we have ‘Team Comics,’ which is defined by its geekiness. Just a few days earlier, the recommendation for Lady Gaga’s latest video had a different tone:
“Lady Gaga’s nerd-friendly world…If you like Fritz Lang, Giger, Superman, Sin City and Bernard Herrmann, you are sure to like this short SF film!”
I much preferred the old High/low thing. On the other hand, I’m not sure I agree with the ‘high art connotations’ in that my work, however intellectual it gets, is still always ‘about something.’ It is illustration in other words, and that has for a century and a half run in a contrary direction to ‘high art.’
So, when you say you hope to represent the entirety of life, you don’t think that’s a high art ambition? I know there has been Gasoline Alley, but largely that’s been the domain of literature, right?
I wrote something here then deleted it. I really don’t know any more. ‘High art,’ ‘literary’… these kinds of frames are usually describing our relationship to something rather than the thing itself. And Gasoline Alley might be confusing the picture here. That’s a depiction of a pleasant ordinary ‘everyday’ in small town America like you might have heard on the radio. In the context of our current overblown comic books it appeals for its ordinariness and also it represents America’s view of itself in a time and place. If I used the word ‘entirety’, I meant let’s not leave out the commonplace.
OK, this notion of illustration then: do you mean your comics are illustration or that your drawings illustrate your text, or rather – the ‘literary’ writing behind it?
In the larger world of art, anything representational is seen as illustrating something other than itself. A painting of two people talking illustrates a conversation. A picture of a bowl of flowers is an illustration of a bowl of flowers. A painting that has no relationship to anything in the real world however, is pure and escapes from the supposed taint of illustration. Pure painting is not representational. (Even something like Lichtenstein, a discussion of whom both you and I got involved in a couple of years back: his picture of a girl with a tear in her eye is not an illustration of a weeping girl in the same way that the source panel from the comic book is… but that’s an argument for another day…) I’m always illustrating something, so I can’t imagine my work ever being discussed in a conventional fine art context. There would have to be a rather dramatic change in the game for that to happen.
In a narrower context, illustration is making pictures to order for commercial purposes. In an infinitesimally small context, illustration is saying one thing in a caption and same thing in the drawing that it is attached to. In an even more conservative version of that, it’s crafting the picture into a very attractive representation of the thing it is describing, more attractive than is theoretically necessary. A hundred and fifty years ago, being well read was considered a good thing to be, therefore pictorial art that referred to scenes from books (e.g. the Pre-Raphaelites and their contemporaries) was held in high regard, and in due course there was a golden age of illustration that gave us people like Norman Rockwell. But the literary establishment came to see illustration as a low thing, because it corrupted the primacy of the word. That’s not even a Victorian thing, because the Victorian era was the great age of illustration, but a later superiority that crept into literary establishment. The theory was conceived that it stunted the imagination of the young.
This of course is nuts. I often look at the ease with which old-time illustrators drew the rigging in an old ship, or something equivalent to the remoteness of that from our own experience. How could you ever know about something like that unless you see it in a picture (short of seeing it in life of course, always preferable)? To tell somebody that they have to imagine it is willfully illogical. But that is the tenor of the age we grew up in and the residue of which we still find ourselves confronted with. (In the one-year foundation course in art I did at college I was horrified when they realized they were going to have to give us a lesson in perspective, because only half a dozen people in the class knew anything about it. Representational drawing had fallen so low, but this is something I smile at when I still hear some old codgers complain about it)(maybe you just did :) ). The lowest of all arts is the one that is made up entirely of illustration, the one that we are discussing. There used to be something raffish about the contrariness of that. There isn’t any more, which depresses me. But if I think about it too much I’ll go mad. Which is not to say I haven’t already.
I hear you, but I’m not sure I follow entirely: the visual fine arts historically have been and continue to be representational in large measure, and aren’t we, in fact, seeing this rather dramatic shift taking place, where comics are being discussed increasingly in such a context? And couldn’t one make the argument that your comics contributed toward this shift? I mean, the Alec stories explicitly champion comics as an art form, From Hell does it at least implicitly, even Bacchus has that subtext. I guess what I’m trying to get at is your notion of what comics have to offer as an art form, and how they might derive and realize such potential precisely because of their lowbrow history. Is your point that such terminology gets in the way of the “thing itself” – and if so, what framework would you prefer for the discussion of it?
We’re discussing it seriously here, but in the world out there I’m concerned that what has happened is that the culture at large has, instead of leveling out the high/low thing, plunged to the level of comic books. So I don’t think there is a fine art to aspire to any more, except insomuch as one might aspire to live in a bygone age. Good work happens wherever it happens. There are no ‘art forms.’ The best work happens independently of that. Think of Tom Phillips’ The Humument or Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World. And as for comics, they start to interest me somewhere after the point where they stop being comics. Apart from the very old stuff of course. I’ll always have a fondness for the classics.
The high/low thing has been replaced in the present-day by an obsession with categories and genres and trying to draw lines of demarcation and hold everybody to them. You get articles around the comics net in which writers try to figure out what exactly a comic is, and what qualifies and doesn’t qualify. Order is wanting and people will make up some system of order rather than face having to get along without it. Now we no longer say ‘Is it art?’ or ‘is it literature?’ We say, ‘yes but is The Arrival comics?’ or ‘is Vonnegut science fiction,’ or ‘the graphic novel is not a genre, it’s a format,’ or ‘This isn’t gangsta rap, it’s crunk.’
Also, in my experience, anyone who describes themselves as a “fine artist” usually turns out to be an idiot.
Disappearance
From Alec McGarry to the disappeared Artist, your central character has always been an unstable entity, and you’ve moved toward fairly extreme dissolution in Fate of the Artist, which sees theoretical concerns take over what has generally been, or at least felt like, a fairly realistic, accessible narrative in earlier books. The book evinces a tension in the work that one realizes was there all along, but less foregrounded. Where does this tension come from, and did you find it impossible to proceed without addressing it?
I’m guessing you mean the idea of art and MacGarry’s relationship to that. As early as page 68 in the Pants book there’s a direct reference to this, although prior to that we would always be presuming that he had some other agenda above working in a factory. In Graffiti Kitchen it’s there, but there’s always a certain cynical caution about the subject. By the end of How to Be an Artist, the disappointments are accumulating. Fate of the Artist is a full-fledged attempt to bail out. Perhaps he would like to turn back the clock to the years of, in the words of Nietsche, “…that happy state in which one does not yet know the limits of one’s gifts and thinks that all objects of love are attainable.”
CARO: Both How to Be and Artist and Fate of the Artist are very concerned with influence, but How to Be an Artist references are much more overtly to comics history than Fate’s, which reference art and film and literature. The influences in Fate seem much more distant than those in How to Be an Artist; there’s no image of you knocking on the door of the Petersplatz or the Globe. The story of the CDs implies a deep investment in music, but it’s still depicted with distance, due to the conceit of the author being missing. The effect of reading them back-to-back is that affectionate intimacy of your relationship with comics comes across really strongly. The pan-arts references in Fate are something I really like about the book, but do you think you could have written Fate referencing the history of comics in the places that you referenced the history of the other arts, or was it essential to you to cast a wider net?
In How to Be an Artist the idea was to present comics as an art to stand in for all arts. The book was in the form of a comic and it was relevant to use the history of that idiom. But I’m interested in art as a whole. And on page 298 I let R.G. Collingwood make it clear on my behalf: “The story is the same whether we look at Samian pottery or Anglian carving, Elizabethan drama or Venetian painting…” In Fate I wanted to develop the theme further. In the interim since I had started How to Be an Artist (1996), I had become more consciously interested in postmodernism. This consciousness began with a chap who wrote his university thesis on aspects of postmodernism in my autobiographical work. I got to thinking, ‘hey, I better look into this whole thing, check out some of these texts I keep stumbling upon.’ No big surprises, as I think I must have breathed in a lot of information without being aware of it, but this did help me out of an impasse. I had started writing Fate as a prose novel, believe it or not, which is the point here. It wasn’t a comic, so my affection for comics wasn’t going to be relevant to it, in answer that part of your question. And during this time I had been keeping the roof on the house by doing Batman and other superhero things, not all of which were mentioned by Alex Boney the other day. But I was having trouble writing in a voice that didn’t sound bogus. In fact most fiction sounds bogus to me. I can rarely get past reading the first page of other people’s novels. So I let it be bogus and threw in a lot of other bogus pastiche stuff, even using O. Henry’s voice to say what I wanted to say, and the thing ended up being another big complicated comic, but that is the odd direction by which I arrived at it. My own voice is a visual/verbal one I guess.
CARO: Fate opens up a nice double entendre in the title (the kind that would have been immediately obvious if it were in French): it’s both the artist’s fate and artistic “fate”, both “the fate of the artist” and “the kind of fate appropriate to the artist.” And that “fate” appropriate to the artist is a chaos, held together with a paperclip (the paperclip on the toilet, the paperclip on the brick). So there’s a really nice synergy between the “not very tightly held together” chaotic universe and the “not very tightly held together” artistic identity. And Evans’ desire for control is, in the end, what kills the artist off.
The book itself is pretty tight conceptually, though, even though you do a great job of making it seem insouciant. There’s this cluster of contradictory things at the center of this view of art, which is why, I think, it’s so compelling as art to me. Re-reading this immediately after How to Be an Artist, though, where “fate” was more a motivating force that you had to submit to, I wonder how much the idea of submission to chaos, not trying to control, is meant as advice, a philosophical assertion of how to approach making and taking in art.
The dichotomy is between the arts on the one hand and the sciences and other more logical disciplines on the other. Once again, R.G. Collingwood: “To the historian accustomed to studying the growth of scientific or philosophical knowledge, the history of art represents a painful and disquieting spectacle.” That one line expresses my overriding theme in all of these books. In our own time this spectacle consists of the upsetting of the traditional high art/low art balance. Campbell’s issue with this is that he thought this meant that comics would be accepted as a medium, with its particular forms, and also with its rich background of having evolved through its Kings, Herrimans and Caniffs, etc., etc., but what has actually happened is that the whole geek thing has prevailed and we have a huge proportion of the movies coming out of Hollywood being based on superhero comics, or they might as well be, and genius-grant-winning novelists writing issues of superhero comics. And fine art, somehow missing the fact it’s now on a level field, is still appropriating crap all over the place with all the imagination of tribute bands. It’s such a crushing disappointment, the whole current artistic landscape. Things didn’t turn out as I dreamed they might have. The potential satisfactions perceived at the outset have disappeared in the reshuffling.
I didn’t exactly say that in Fate, as ordinary readers are unlikely to know what I’m talking about (he gets to draw pictures for a living; what’s he got to complain about?). So I went for a more conventional and more entertaining malaise, the problem of being a vampire in my use of living people in my work, a thing which does worry me from time, and its accessible. And it’s not like I’ve thrown in a bottle of magic absinthe. And knowing that was the conclusion, I built the book toward that. But in a much more general sense, and I think this should come across in the work, the idea of art and being an artist never pays off in the way we imagined it would. (Hence my forays into history in Fate). For every Shakespeare or Mozart there’s a Louis Gabriel Guillemain who wanted out of the world enough to stab himself fourteen times before expiring, or a Henri Duparc, a composer who destroyed all his work except for a dozen songs that escaped from him and you can find on one CD, who wrote in a letter to a friend: “Having lived 25 years in a splendid dream, the whole idea of [musical] representation has become – I repeat to you – repugnant. The other reason for this destruction, which I do not regret, was the complete moral transformation that God imposed on me 20 years ago and which, in a single minute, obliterated all of my past life. Since then, [my opera] Roussalka, not having any connection with my new life, should no longer exist.” So there’s also a mysterious psychological element to investigate. But that’s perhaps for a future project. Fate exhausts the theme for now, and my next book, which I’ve nearly finished, will be all about money, you’ll be glad to hear.
It seems clear that Fate is your most complex effort so far to step outside yourself and to go beyond the already fairly complex set of narrative registers you’d operated on up till then, i.e. the narrator in the captions, the Alec character who morphs into Eddie in Snooter, the different versions of same that appear occasionally, the intermittent spilling over of inner (verbal) monologue into symbolic imagery, etc. An attempt to suppress that, while acknowledging the inescapable presence of you as an author – did you have a concern that your work might otherwise risk solipsism?
To avoid tipping over into insanity I should think. How sane that fellow looks, at the end of Fate, now that he has managed to escape from himself. I guess he was doing it by increments over the years. I see what you mean though. Even in fairly straightforward sequences there was often a switching from third to first person, long before I complicated it by introducing the second person, and from past to present tense, before I threw in the future. Occasionally I would catch myself doing those first/third changes and past/present and then wonder whether I should leave it or change it. I’d scour assorted literary works to catch the masters doing it. It’s everywhere in Henry Miller, so I figured that it must have been debated already as much as it needs to be debated. So the authorial identity uncertainties were part of the prevailing neurosis of my oeuvre before I threw MacGarry out altogether.
The next step was to cast the actor Richard Siegrist in my place. I didn’t develop this as there was already too much in the book already, so it remains an extra-textual thing that never got invited in. Somewhere in all my files and collection of old jazz music, the name Siegrist appears as a confusion of Secrest. Andy Secrest was a trumpet player who as a young man fell under the influence and artistic spell of the great Bix Beiderbecke (who pops up on page 75 of Fate as one of the author’s circle of imaginary friends… to the true inhabitant of the imaginary realm, one’s heroes are really in the room), and who got his first big break in music by subbing for Bix in the Paul Whiteman orchestra. By all accounts, he was an amiable chap whom everybody liked, including Bix. An Italian film-maker, Pupi Avati, made a drama-biopic of Bix’s life in 1991, which I haven’t seen (trailer).
This relates to what I was saying earlier about movies and ‘there can be no drama without conflict.’ In the same way that Salieri was made the envious villain in the life of Mozart first through Pushkin’s drama Mozart and Salieri of 1831, an apparent falsehood perpetuated all the way through through Shaeffer’s play, Amadeus of 1979. In the same way, the innocent Secrest was cast as a scheming and jealous rival to Bix in Pupi’s film (so I have read). You can see how this relates to my thesis about the artist’s fate being in the hands of an unreasonable world. I satirized the absurdity of this baloney in Fate by having author Campbell murdered by his book-designer, Evans. I even describe the body ‘double-bagged.’ Since he wasn’t in fact murdered, obviously, all the other suppositions must also fall apart.
The funny part about it really is that this murder was an addition that I put in at the twelfth hour because my editor, Mark Siegel, felt that the drama of the book had been left unresolved. And funnier still, the designer, who was the last to handle the digital files, wreaked his own vengeance by salting away a secret message in the small print on page 46 of Fate, which wasn’t discovered till after the book was printed. I turned the story of this conflict into a stand-up comedy performance, which was filmed in Chicago by Bookslut. All of this is a huge self-indulgence unless we allow that it illustrates my point about the artist’s fate being swallowed in a vortex of untruths that are superfluous to the simple facts of his short time on the planet. And if you shouted ‘Self-indulgence!!’, I can only wonder at how you got all the way to the end of a huge interview with an author about his 640-page autobiographical comic. [Matthias laughs].
_______________
The entire roundtable on The Years Have Pants is here.
In addition, our colleagues at the Panelists held a simultaneous roundtable on Campbell, focusing especially on the Playwright but touching several other works as well. Their roundtable is here.
Excellent interview. Eddie Campbell’s thoughts on his own work and comics and art in general are always worth reading, but he needs a symapthetic interviewer to get the best out of him. Great work.
No comments after 2 days? I think everybody is intimidated by Mr Campbell…as am I!
So, two irrelevant remarks:
1) I’ve just read M.Leotard, and though it falls out of the purview of this roundtable I just want to say how delightful it was; joy and sadness mixed;
2) Assuming Mr Campbell is reading this– could you please take up your blog again?
http://eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/
It was probably the best cartoonist blog going, and you gave it up in November 2009! Pleeeeeease, Mr C, I’m on my kneeeeeeeeeeeees, Mr C, I know it’s the tail wagging the artist dog, but you must, must, MUST start up anew your blog!
Oy, page 46 of Fate! I had missed that.
(Of course I missed that. I would need Chris Ware-worthy spectacles to make that joke pop out!)
A wonderfully illuminating, brain-prodding interview. Great stuff, thank you! It may be that the sheer density of it, and the way it fires off in some many intellectually enticing directions at once, have kept people from getting up the nerve to comment.
I was very gratified to see some discussion of word/picture balance, and found myself interested and surprised by Mr. Campbell’s answers. Also really enjoyed the section about the hi/low distinction. Thanks to both of you (or all three of you) for a whole lot to chew on!
Nope! Nerve or lack thereof has nothing to do with it…
Well, what the hell, since Charles is goading us:
“I’m not sure I agree with the ‘high art connotations’ in that my work, however intellectual it gets, is still always ‘about something.’ It is illustration in other words, and that has for a century and a half run in a contrary direction to ‘high art.’”
That doesn’t seem very helpful. High art hasn’t jettisoned the idea of being “about something” in any sense, I don’t think. Kara Walker, Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman, Tom Friedman, Nick Cave (soundsuit artist, not the musician) — they all are about lots of things: form, gender, race, politics, art, what have you. I kind of hate contemporary literature, but to say it’s not about anything seems pretty wrong. John Ashberry is about the space between high art and low art, and different registers of language among other things. It’s not narrative, but that’s pretty different than saying it isn’t about anything.
There’s also a fair bit of illustration done in high art contexts…I mean, I presume he knows that.
Also…Woman’s World really kind of sucks. It’s fairly sexist and transphobic, as well as being built on bone-headed cliches. There are certainly worse books in existence, and it’s extremely clever in its process, but still, seeing it held up as an example of the great cross-pollinating art of the future is a little depressing.
On a less cranky note…the bit where Matthias fails to realize that the caption and the picture are connected (surely one of a comics’ interviewers worst nightmares) is priceless, as is Campbell’s gracious correction. It’s nice too because it really does say something about that panel, which is silent and isn’t — rather like comics.
I agree that ‘high art’ today is ‘about something’ more often than not, and — as I say in the interview — even ‘illustrates’ it frequently. I think however that Campbell’s distinction between high and low has more to do with its connotations, and whether it is of any use to him as an artist, than with any strict adherence to a definition. He clearly is uninterested in defining it and prefers to ignore it altogether.
As for that panel, heh, it was really strange. I mean I read it (including the caption) and it felt off, and after that I just couldn’t see the caption anymore, as if my mind had decided that it wasn’t there. Really embarrassing, but as you say, perhaps testament to how comics sometimes work on us.
“they all are about lots of things: form, gender, race, politics, art, what have you.”
Noah, it sounds to me that these artists have let the business of what their art is about be in the hands of critical discourse rather than theirs. You can make up what it’s about, like you did with Eddie Campbell’s book. :)
Hey Ashley. I don’t think you could say that if you’d seen works by any of those artists, or by all of them. I didn’t delve into any individual work…but to say Kara Walker doesn’t have very definite content, you kind of have to not have looked at her work at all. Or even heard anything about it. You should google her and see what you think, anyway; I think she’s someone comics folks in particular really need to have a dialogue with.
Critics always bring their own readings…just like readers do. Art isn’t algebra; it’s a relationship and communication. But visual art doesn’t have any less content and isn’t any less shaped than comics.
Matthias, I think it’s right that Campbell doesn’t find the distinction useful, and I’m fairly sympathetic there. But at the same time, as he rejects it he seems to somewhat defensively buy into some of the stereotypes of high art that can be particularly popular (as Ashley shows) in the comics world — that it isn’t trying to say anything, has no use for illustration, etc. I don’t think in general those ideas are accurate or helpful.
I think it’s a really sound (as it were) reading of that panel to argue that it effectively detaches the caption from itself. Misreadings can be the most interesting readings.
It is not difficult to list names of practicing artists to support any contention you can think of, and I have no interest in getting into that kind of argument. However, you have as usual misinterpreted the text in front of you, a habit necessary for you to maintain your smug superiority to the ‘comics world’. You have presumed that I think Art OUGHT to be ‘about something’ when in fact I mean quite the contrary. It ought to be about nothing but itself. I shall give a few examples lest I leave this disquisition with any more abstractions. My examples shall also have something of the spectacle about them lest there be any taint of the obscure or intellectual or anti-populist.
Improv everywhere
http://improveverywhere.com/2008/01/31/frozen-grand-central/
Theo Jansen’s strandbeests,
http://dvice.com/archives/2007/12/lumbering_stran.php#more
Spencer Tunick’s massed nudes,
http://www.spencertunick.com/artwork.html
Ron Mueck’s colossal sculptures,
http://a10.idata.over-blog.com/0/00/15/71/ron_mueck_accroupi_on_usti_studio_webzine.jpg
Hi Eddie. Thank you for the examples!
Do you really think the Mueck is about nothing? It seems like it’s about reality and representation, world and art. Hyper-realism has to be about the world and not just about itself, it seems like.
So if you think that art should be only about itself, and you think high art has moved more towards being about nothing, do you feel that comics should attempt to be more like high art? That doesn’t seem right….
Alex, I forgot to say hi and thanks for the good words. Re the blog, for a while I was enamoured with the notion that blogging is the literature of our times. Blogging has its own way of doing things that will be clearer after a passage of time, and the best of it all will be celebrated. But then I had to admit it wasn’t helping me sell any books.
Noah, I don’t want to be a spokesman for comics. That tends to be my problem with the public perception of the medium. I’m always being asked to speak for the whole thing.
Re Ron Mueck, I’d say he made his pieces either much larger than life or much smaller than life, both, to avoid any suggestion that they were illustrations of life. To stand in front of one is to be vacant of any thought as to its meaning or purpose and be simply filled with awe.
I’m just getting back to this (did I mention I’m buying a house? only maybe 30 times…) but in my limited experience, which is mostly trying to drum up support for a project about commercial and advertising illustration in the 1950s, the fine art world likes the idea of illustration well enough but doesn’t really have that many well-thought-out frameworks for talking about it. Illustration doesn’t quite fit. I don’t get the sense that illustration really “belongs” to fine art as a discipline and an industry.
So I think it has something to do with the way illustration is about something. There are more and less abstract ways to be about things, and fine art has tended to favor the more abstract ones, especially during the century and a half Eddie refers to.
Not that the comment is entirely limited to illustration but that’s how I took it when I read this hurriedly the first time.
Hey Eddie. That’s certainly fair not wanting to speak for comics.
I haven’t stood in front of Mueck’s pieces myself, so I don’t know if that’s the experience I would have or not. Looking at the pictures though…it seems like there’s something there about estranging reality; creation as grotesque parody, which points to reality as both grotesque and sublime.
Even awe…it’s hard to get away from ideas about religion when you think of awe. There just really seems to be content there to me…and somewhat interesting content. Which I like about them.
Not sure if you want to keep this up, but…is that something you aim for in your own comics? Moving beyond meaning and purpose to create something that simply inspires awe? That seems like a very difficult goal for comics; it’s awfully hard to separate words from meaning….
Is that true though Caro? Fine art definitely has a major tradition of abstraction — but it also has a perhaps even stronger tradition of conceptual art, where being about something is kind of paramount — or even the only thing in some ways.
I wouldn’t draw the line between abstraction and conceptual art as strongly as you are. I think they’re both drawing on pretty abstract ways of being about things…even the most meaning-saturated conceptual art doesn’t “tell” its message directly like conventional prose narrative or a heavily narrative comic. Broadly speaking, conceptual art is either metaphorical or performative…or both.
In fact, conceptual art is more likely to rely on the catalog or the gallery or the artist’s statement to supply that all-important narrative element- I’d argue there is a narrative (despite the fear of stepping into that territory)- its just a narrative of artist as creator. Read something about a conceptual artist, and most likely its an analysis of the available biographical fragments of that artist.
Most of the conceptual art statements I’ve read are spelling out whatever metaphorical or performative meaning the piece is supposed to have. I agree you could easily make the argument that the art is in fact an illustration of the artist’s statement, but that’s not really the claim that’s made for that art — wouldn’t most conceptual artists dispute giving the statement that absolute of a priority? The claim is rather that the semiotic content is metaphorical or performative and the statement is just an elucidation of it. And you can spell out the semiotic significance of a piece of abstract art too — look at T.J. Clarke’s work on Picasso, or Krauss’s on Frank Stella. Conceptual art just collapses the subject positions of the artist and the critic.
The point of all that being only that the kind of meaning Noah’s attributing to art like Mueck’s or Walker is a different kind of meaning from that of, say, N.C. Wyeth or Norman Rockwell. Not absolutely different, but significantly different — especially when the question is those artists relative reception within fine art.
Caro…yes, but there’s also a tradition of illustration within fine art, right? Like Raymond Pettibon….
Well, in addition to being an actual illustrator (band posters), Pettibon slides in the back door in the same way as Darger, or even Grandma Moses, without actually acquiring the pejorative title of “outsider” or “naive”. “Look at this quaint fellow, still drawing things! With text no less that references some type of story!” I think, strangely enough, that would fit under Mr. Campbell’s neat summation above-
>>And fine art, somehow missing the fact it’s now on a level field, is still appropriating crap all over the place with all the imagination of tribute bands. >>>>
Not that Pettibon himself is doing the appropriation, but rather that he himself has been appropriated.
I don’t know…Pettibon is pretty solidly respected and quite influential as far as I can tell. There was a huge retrospective of his work at the Smart gallery near me a while back — very snooty hip little museum.
Or what about Paul Nudd? He’s a friend of mine and much less of a big deal than Pettibone — but he does illustration as well as other projects (video-making, sculpture.) He’s definitely in an illustration tradition too, but fine art is happy to give him gallery shows and treat him like an artist. Lilli Carre gets gallery shows too. So does Edie Fake. There’s just a ton of crossover; so much that people don’t really think that much about it.
When you’re saying that major, central, celebrated, acclaimed artists are being appropriated…what does that even mean at that point? Appropriated for what? By whom? They’re part of the conversation; their work is looked at and talked about and responded to. They get gallery shows and people buy their work and they get put in museums. They have peer and institutional support.
I don’t really agree that fine art misses the fact that’s it’s on a level field, I guess. Being on a level field is the whole point of fine art. That’s what Duchamp was about, and he’s probably the single most influential artist of the last 100 years. A toilet is art, soup cans are art, comics are art. There’s broad agreement on that I think. There’s certainly a lot of fine art that’s derivative, like any other kind of art, but I don’t think the reason is especially tied to appropriation.
Pop Art is definitely art. Raymond Pettibon is a huge blue-chip mainstream fine art artist. He was perhaps even on the PBS art:21 series.
And art being about just itself is mystical modernist propaganda,
I think we’re talking at cross-purposes a little. I’ll have to think about appropriation — but the point I’m trying to get at doesn’t at all prevent pop art from being art. Think of abstract not as a noun, the opposite of “representational” and “concrete” but as a verb — to detach, disconnect, to take away, to remove, to consider without reference to a particular instance.
Conventional narrative is highly particular. Narrative writing takes something inherently and profoundly abstract — the linguistic system of signs — and particularizes it, to the point that it becomes “imagery”. Both “abstract” and conceptual art go the other way — from the concrete representation that was historically the provenance of fine art toward the abstract (to varying degrees). So the way those arts make meaning — whether that meaning is the performative gesture of a complete refusal of narrative or representational sense (as with the phenomenology informing early abstractions, Malevich in particular) or simply the assumption of meaning by reference to an external narrative (whether implied or documented) as in the case of conceptual art — the mechanism by which they make meaning happens “at one remove”, at least in comparison with conventional writing and illustration. Abstract and conceptual art play in the same abstracted space as the system of signs itself. So the “meaning” of that kind of art is abstract in the philosophico-linguistic sense, whether or not the art itself is “abstract” in the art historical sense.
That’s what I mean when I say fine art’s been preoccupied with abstraction. Literature has been too. Modernity was preoccupied with articulating that type of abstraction, regardless of whether any given object or person fell on one side or the other of the debate about it, and postmodernity has, in at least the literary sense, been about making it problematic, exploring how it works in specific, particular contexts. But it doesn’t go away in either. And postmodern fine art has remained significantly more engaged with formal abstraction than postmodern literature has.
One of the things that I like so much about EC’s work, particularly Fate of the Artist, is that unlike many comics that play with this kind of semiotic abstraction (many of which I also really really love but which are very different), Campbell actually gets to the synthesis of these disparate elements, the conceptual and semiotic abstractions with the particularities of illustration and conventional narrative.
So you get from Fate of the Artist, in particular, the same doubled pleasure that you get from really great postmodern literature, post-experimentation, a doubling that is often lost in postmodern visual art and in comics strongly influenced by visual art, because in those cases the abstraction is very dominant. This imbalance happens even in comics where the images carry the narrative work, because the process of imbuing imagery with signification only calls attention to the constructedness of the linguistic sign. That’s one reason why work like Ware’s or Asterios Polyp feel so palpably and insistently modernist to me – the mechanisms of meaning-making are so very close to the surface. What makes Fate so successful a postmodern work is that it consistently and elusively couples the abstract and concrete into that doubling. The particularities (narrative, setting, character) absolutely push against the conceptual abstractions, but the book neither eschews the abstraction as many highly narrative comics do or derogates the concrete as many highly modernist comics do — each mode resists the other. Things are simultaneously and fully abstract and concrete — and most delightfully, that tension is part of the explicit meaning of the story, in the character of the “missing author”, abstracted from himself and yet present constantly throughout the book. Even in the prose world, there’s only a couple of shelves worth of novels that achieve that so elegantly, and it’s vastly easier in prose. It’s really quite a remarkable book.
To be direct: I probably wouldn’t use Campbell’s phrasing that this means postmodern fine art is not “about” something — but I think it is definitely more removed from the things it’s about than illustration is, and I think that matters in pretty much exactly the way Campbell says it does.
I don’t know for certain but perhaps Campbell when he talks about “pure painting” is pointing back to Appolinaire, who said in his 1912-1913 text of that title [click here], that painting is pure when it comes totally from the imagination of the artist, when it’s separated from reality. Illustration is not separated from reality, even if the reality is just the reality of the text or concept that it illustrates. It’s not far fetched to describe that as being “about something” and it’s historically accurate to oppose it to “pure painting.”
I think what he’s saying is that his work is separate from high visual art because it doesn’t participate in that “pure painting” tradition, which has been tremendously influential in visual art — illustration is always making those references to reality. I don’t think that separates it from “art literature,” though; literature never really had an equivalent concept to “pure painting.” Appolinaire himself in that article says that the “pure literature” is music — which, logically, makes all written literature impure. He wrote that, of course, long before poststructuralism muddied those waters, but the ties of literature to experience and ordinary communication are intuitive in a way that poststructuralism is not. So literature, I believe, has retained an illustrative element that is much stronger than the similar element in visual art.
What I think you’re missing, Noah, and I think we bump into this difference of opinion quite frequently when we get to this point and I go to literature and you go to conceptual art for examples, is the extent to which conceptual art is still a descendant of pure painting because its meaning-making happens at that abstract remove. Illustration is completely Other to pure painting, and I think that’s the “low” tradition that gets sort of lost when high art begins to subsume things — what makes something art now is the way we talk about it, the abstract meanings and explanations that are created for it, not the way it is in the world. Art is just as much a community as Team Comics…the high/low distinction was, oddly, less cliquish, more tied to the thing itself. I don’t think the examples and readings you’re giving are actually opposed to the notion that fine art is abstracted, “not about things”: I think they’re directly produced by that perspective.
Caro, I think there’s something to that…but I think you’re maybe missing the extent to which art is actually willing to just chuck that division. It’s much, much less nervous about it than comics is, at least as far as I can tell.
In the first place, there’s a whole successful tradition of photography which is quite directly representational and which is definitely high art.
There’s also video and animation which are often not very far separated from documentary or cartoons. Very much considered part of high art at this point.
I think those traditions are actually as or more influential than painting at this point, for what that’s worth.
In the second…well, the last gallery show I went to was about global warming and included super 8 video of icebergs, a pop song by Robyn HItchcock, and statements by celebrities talking about global warming. It wasn’t especially great or anything, but those pieces weren’t very abstract, and I don’t think anyone would say they weren’t art.
The show I reviewed before that I think was at the modern art museum in Chicago and was about comics. Narrative pages tacked up on the walls. Again, it wasn’t so great, but there’s clearly a willingness there to consider representational and narrative work as art.
Campbell noted that you can find examples for everything, so maybe it doesn’t matter — but when I go to galleries (not that frequently, but every so often) I see some things that are quite representational and then others that are more abstracted. I see stuff that uses narrative too in various ways. Not infrequently these days you’ll even see comics — sometimes ghettoized in their own shows, but not always (I first saw Jeff Brown’s work in a gallery show.)
I mean, visual art is often really bad for various reasons, and is certainly insular in its own ways — it’s a small world, so it’s a lot of who you know, whether you show up in the right places, networking, etc., which is incestuous and depressing. And it’s a lot about money too of course — money in terms of small numbers of rich people rather than the public market. But I just don’t see the institutional resistance to more directly representational forms of meaning that you’re talking about.
Quoth Gilles Deleuze, “Absolute immanence is in itself; it is not in something; it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject… A life is immanence of immanence, absolute immanence; it is complete power, complete bliss.” So, firstly, no object can just represent itself without any participation and context– the specificity of a thing is by definition implicated in the sphere in which its individuality is significant. So a Jackson Pollock painting is not about the painting in a closed loop– that’s the kind of ideology deconstruction exists to blow apart. It’s about painting as performance, art material as content, gravity turned sideways, pictures being boundless– that’s a lot more than the “nothing” which would be “itself.” But the intention in Pollock is not unlike the intention in Deleuze (who was a fan of Pollock)– to pretend that ideas of “exteriority” in space and “becoming” in time somehow erase the fact that these guys are all about ineffability and transcendence. Which is great, but it’s hardly something being “about itself.”
Hm, I think I’m still not making my point clear. I’m not talking about representational abstraction. (Which is what “abstraction” refers to in general art parlance and what it seems to refer to in your comment.) I’m talking about semiotic abstraction (which seems like saying the same thing twice to me, as “semiotically concrete” is nonsense.) All contemporary art is semiotically abstract, including art that is representationally concrete (that thing that art just calls “representational.”) But whereas semiotics is always abstract, representation can be both concrete and abstract.
Here’s a tangent into that for a moment:
Art history has a semantic problem (at least at the common parlance level) because it is a habit of mind to think of abstraction as “non-representational”, whereas it’s a pretty central idea of postmodernism that everything’s representation. Abstraction only means removed, not any particular kind of remove, so the idea that there’s anything “non-representational” is nonsense. If everything’s a representation, “abstract” has to mean something else than representation’s opposite. That’s why you can see representational art in contemporary galleries without any loss of the commitment to abstraction — those artists are attentive to the fact that “abstraction” isn’t the opposite of representation, it’s just a measure of how indirectly the art appeals to sense.
Remember in BACC when Rick Moody made the observation that letters has split off into factions of “storytelling” and “abstraction”? This is why — storytelling has that direct element that strong-form postmodernists say is so naive and conventional. Representational art has it too. The measure of art in both disciplines is how much of that indirect abstraction manages to get in a piece of art that is on the surface “representational” or “narrative.” If the thing is playing it straight, it’s unlikely to be considered art — unless someone can cast it as irony. (UGH. What a fucking cop out. I hate irony.)
So the distinction, that committment to semiotic abstraction, is still a committment to abstraction, and it still traces its lineage back to the philosophies of abstraction from the early century (including Appollinaire). It’s just that after Structuralism, you can’t make the recourse to phenomenology that they did.
And now back to art:
The fact that Art embraces some kinds of art that are representationally concrete doesn’t mean it’s rejecting abstraction. Malevich would have said that his art was phenomenological. But to a postmodernist even Black Square is representational art, because there’s no such thing as non-representational art — only a question of how concrete the things being represented are. There is simply art that is more or less concerned with particularities and with direct visual experience and art that is concerned with abstractions. Black Square is absolutely concerned with “abstractions.”
So “representational art” that’s “about” something like gender or global warming or some multi-paragraph philosophical statement or theoretical vantage point or “the meaning of art” — it’s just being extra attentive to semiotic abstraction. And the demand for attention to semiotic abstraction really is just as cliquish as representational abstraction was. It’s a broad “postmodern” clique that you can get access to by reading and understanding Barthes, but it’s still a clique, and it’s a clique that excludes, or at least devalues, more direct modes of meaning making. There’s still a division, it’s just a different division. I don’t see any evidence that contemporary art actually eschews that, except in more fully art historical contexts (like an exhibit of Rembrandt paintings.)
Consider another example from Malevich: if you put a block of marble in a museum it means something entirely different from the exact same block of marble in a studio or a quarry. And what it means in the museum is much more abstract than what it means in the quarry.
So when you say “a willingness to consider representational and narrative work as art,” that doesn’t mean those works aren’t also abstract — because the moment anybody puts it in an “art gallery,” it automatically becomes semiotically abstract, completely regardless of what the content of the art is. “Why is this hanging here?” “What does this say about contemporary representation and artistic discourse?” etc. Those are very “high art” questions now. If the gallery has claims to be presenting art, the art that hangs in that gallery will be displaced into this register of semiotic abstraction and imbued from context with a kind of meaning that it may or may not explicitly participate in. If that displacement into semiotic abstraction doesn’t happen, I don’t think the clique would consider it “high art.”
Comics are books, and they get away from that insistent contextualization in a way that art on a gallery wall can’t. That allows them to retain some of the access that literature has to “being about things,” to more direct and less abstract modes of representation (see my last comment). They can fall out onto the storytelling side of the literary divide more easily than any visual art can — and generally do. Campbell to me makes better use of both poles of that binary than most writers, even in literature, do, which is why I like him. But I still cop to the charge that if there’s no abstraction, I’m likely to say it’s not art. It’s just that literary abstraction is more agile and native than it is in art, because words are abstract to begin with.
This is a big part of why comics’ rejection of literature to me is so dangerous: it’s essentially just keeping faith with mainstream fine art’s century long fascination with different modes of abstraction and not allowing the thing that’s really profoundly unique about comics, its ability to give simultaneous priority to words and images, to play at all.
I think perhaps where I disagree with Matthias and Eddie, and it’s really semantics, is that I don’t fully accept that the high/low breakdown has been successful. It’s just that the “high” and “low” things have different parameters: there is a “high art” context and a “low art context” and any art object can participate in either context. Kitsch is a low art context, even if the art being reproduced started out in a high art context. The museum is a high-art context, even if the art being displayed started out in a low art context. In the academy, low art is more the provenance of cultural studies than it is of the traditional disciplines; it’s still treated with less seriousness than art that can be productively viewed from the high art context.
But I think the disagreement is mostly semantics, because the notion of “communities” (discourse communities, academic communities) is very relelvant in that formulation too.
So then the appropriation would be just that you’re willing to have it in the space and think about it in a different way, rather than the way it’s “supposed” to be thought about?
I’m still somewhat skeptical I think. You say it’s a clique that excludes more direct modes of meaning making. But excludes them how? If you can have those modes on the wall…they’re on the wall. You can say, well, people aren’t reading them as narratives when they’re on the wall…but surely different people approach them in different ways, as with any reading. How is what you’re saying different from suggesting that comics (or genre literature) must be appreciated as comics (or genre literature) or else it undoes their comicness?
If there are tons of example of representational and narrative art that’s viable as art, which there are, it seems like it makes more sense to think about art having a dialogue around these issues, rather than as just forcing narrative into an art box. You take the block of marble and put it in the museum, it has a different meaning. But that meaning also changes the way you look at the block of marble in the quarry. And it also *changes the way you look at the museum.* You could say it makes everything more abstract I suppose — but you could also say it makes the art experience more concrete. A block of rock is more concrete than a story about pirates in a lot of ways, after all.
I think you’re right that low art/high art distinctions are still fairly resilient. But they’re resilient because they’re permeable, not because they aren’t. In visual art, I think you’re putting too much emphasis on the way that things are viewed, and too little on where they’re viewed. You put a comic strip on the wall, it’s high art not because people are going to read it in a particular way (gallery goers haven’t necessarily read Barthes; many people who read comics have) but because it’s on the wall. It’s about institutions and communities, not about semiotics. Which is certainly irritating in its own way, but I don’t think sets up quite the kind of divisions you’re talking about.
Food for thought- appropriation, high and low, painting versus “genre photography,” in a recent court case. As usual, in economic matters self-interest and class divisions become very exposed- http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37286/french-photographer-patrick-cariou-on-his-copyright-suit-victory-against-richard-prince-and-gagosian/
Ouch. Well, that definitely hurts.
Though it’s also the case that the injured party had his own gallery show set up. And as the court said, photos like that have been considered art for a long time….
Did I say exclude or deprioritize? I mean, it’s important that I don’t think there are “divisions” in the sense that you seem to think I do. I think there are hegemonies and cliques, but I don’t think they’re impermeable. What I do think is that being permeable isn’t the same thing as being pluralist. True postmodern pluralism is a complete abandonment of any priority at all.
Art is indeed having a dialogue about these issues, but it’s having it in a particular discursive context that demands a particular prioritization. This thread is an example of that: Campbell’s use of the word “about” triggered what is essentially a philosophical objection to it, one that comes out of these postmodern assumptions(and that largely, I think, obscured what was most interesting to me about what he was saying.) You can see that clearly in Bert’s post about Deleuze, which is spot on — but also demanding of a particular set of priorities that are different from the ones Campbell’s trying to get us to start from. (And yes, the slipperiness here between ‘priority’ in the sense of committment and ‘priority’ in the logical sense is intentional…)
When you say that “where art is” is what matters, that’s semiotics too. It’s less overtly linguistic and more broadly discursive, but it’s still an imposed structure of meaning, which is what semiotics is. The block of rock may be more concrete than a story about pirates — but your understanding of what it means and why it matters to put that block of rock in a museum is vastly MORE abstract than a child’s understanding of that story about pirates. There are still people who will go to the gallery and say “that’s not art” or “my kid could draw that” because they don’t know what you know — that all it takes to make it art is hanging it on the wall. That’s a discourse. Yes it’s a discourse that works by means of a community/institution, but the meaning of that community/institution is defined by a set of specific discourses about meaning and how meaning is made. That’s as much what Campbell is rejecting, it seems to me, as anything, because the gallery is such an abstracted place, where the most important thing about anything is what wall it’s hanging on.
That’s a way of thinking about art that really works against sophisticated understandings of illustration. That’s what I took from Campbell saying that he preferred the older notion of high art – illustration can be present there in a way that it can’t be in the context you’re asking us to consider it in, where discourse and context determines so much, and transforms so much, since illustration plays with discourse and context in a way that is devalued within the postmodern discourse community.
Lichtenstein is another really good example: it’s art because it calls attention to the significance of the art context. But the flip side of that is that it removes attention from the explicit context, right? So it’s art because it’s an abstraction. The original context, the more direct context, is not excluded — it’s devalued. The fact that the image is hanging on a gallery wall doesn’t transfer back, so that it’s “more” art in its original context. You have to have the original context plus the art context for the “it’s art!” to work. And as a consequence the vocabulary for talking about it as illustration, in its original context — the vocabulary for talking about illustration period — is less sophisticated than the vocabulary for talking about art that draws on other, less direct, ways of playing with discourse and context.
That’s a failure of postmodern thinking, but it plagues art after poststructuralism vastly more than it plagues literature after poststructuralism, for the reasons I stated in the comment about Appollinaire. But literature has somewhat exhausted the tension, and I think Campbell opens up some interesting things that speak back against the hegemony of that linguistic semiotic framing, but with more acknowledgement and understanding of postmodernism than artists and people from art generally give. You can’t do postmodernism unless you understand words extremely well, much more than most people working in art do, because postmodernism gives logical priority to linguistics. This is the thing that Franklin Einspruch rightly pointed to as a problem: hegemonic postmodernism should be an oxymoron, but it isn’t. Postmodernism can’t insist on anything without slipping into modernism — but it nonetheless insists on is the primacy of language.
But when you try to put image in that place of priority, which artists and critics who reject the linguistic frame do, things just fall apart, because images are not as semiotically stable as language, and the way they function as a ground is vastly more obscure than the way language does so. Art’s response to things falling apart has largely (the exception being those who work within the linguistic frame) been a recourse to Old Philosophy, to aesthetics and history, rather than pushing postmodern philosophy to the next step. It wants to reject the linguistic priority in favor of an image priority, not recognizing that the only postmodern possibility is for neither to have priority. Comics is the only art form that both formally and natively embody that. And Campbell is one of the few cartoonists who speaks to it at all, because he doesn’t have contempt for words. So when he says that his comics are “about” things in a way that a lot of high visual art isn’t, I think it’s worth giving him the benefit of the doubt because he’s in such an extremely interesting position vis-a-vis postmodernism. Responding to him with strong-form postmodernism just obscures the fact that he’s suggesting a correction to the very strong form postmodernism you’re trying to use against him…the subtleties of what he said are lost when the out-of-discourse use of the word “about” is what we fixate on (despite the fact that yes, his use of “about” is outside the discourse…)
But…the use of “about” there seems pretty important, doesn’t it? If you deny that postmodernism has meaning, how do you work with, or even against, the meaning it has? Framing the difference as no meaning vs. some meaning seems very unhelpful to me (whether you argue that no meaning is bad, which is what I initially thought Eddie was saying, or whether you argue that it’s the ideal as he later clarified.)
You seem to end up arguing that visual art prioritizes language, which seems like an odd place to be. Maybe you could expand on this:
“since illustration plays with discourse and context in a way that is devalued within the postmodern discourse community.”
What are you thinking of exactly there? Eddie talked about ship’s rigging in the interview…but that sort of concrete vision of things seems like it’s been devalued as much because of photography and film as because of a shift in the stance of fine art.
I don’t think it is that important. I wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but it’s just a signal to me that he’s not being painstakingly postmodern in his choice of vocabulary. I didn’t read it as saying postmodernism (the postmodernism of “high art connotations”) has no meaning. I read it as saying postmodernism does not respect referential logic, which is entirely true.
I do actually think that contemporary visual art does prioritize language, perhaps unconsciously but often not. I mean, “conceptual art”. For postmodernism of the linguistic turn, all concepts are linguistic. Identity is linguistic. Conscious existence itself is fundamentally linguistic. That’s why it’s called the linguistic turn. A chair is not a chair. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Surrealism and Dada are linguistics, and Surrealism and Dada are utterly essential to contemporary art.
And that’s what I’m getting at when I talk about things falling apart when you try to give images priority. You just end up setting the conversation outside the philosophy of the linguistic turn altogether, which amounts to a rejection of most important art from the 20th century and a complete rejection of 20th century literature.
On the bit you quote: Saussure’s most salient point, were it to be strictly applied to images (meaning were images to be treated as signs), would mean that no visual representation ever actually illustrates anything because reference is entirely and essentially arbitrary. The absolute arbitrariness of reference is a pretty fundamental postulate of the linguistic turn. But it’s problematic for visual art. Visual art reference is not nearly as essentially arbitrary as linguistic reference — but it’s also vastly less schematized. And the Pearciean theory of the icon isn’t parallel enough to Saussure to easily recast all of the theory of the linguistic turn that’s based on Saussure. (It bugs me that Peirce is where people go for this. The only person who has ever had anything insightful to say about this is Picasso, in his painting. And doesn’t that sound like Domingos? ;) )
So in this sense, post/Modernism rejects the possibility of illustration. If all representation is intensely mitigated, then the relationship of an illustration to its referent is called into question in a way that essentially evacuates the term “illustration” of any meaning at all.
The question is whether that can be fixed without abandoning postmodernism altogether, and I think Fate of the Artist is absolutely the best thing that’s been said about THAT so far. But, for the record, it’s not “about” that, that’s not its referent. That’s its “meaning,” at least for me.
Ah, okay. That’s clearer.
In that sense illustration isn’t drawing, it’s actually illustrating something. And so the question is how does post-modernism work if the sign isn’t arbitrary?
The thing is…I think you’re downplaying the extent to which visual reference — pointing to the world — is important in a lot of visual art. Photography especially, but film and video too. That’s what Cavell was talking about, as near as I can tell. So the idea that that sort of discussion is donwplayed or devalued in visual art — some visual art perhaps, but certainly not all. Photography is really central to visual art at the moment. In that climate change show I was at, the use of photography to refer to being there — as evidence, as illustration — was absolutely central, and I don’t think that’s at all unusual.
Sure — I worked for Silverdocs, which is about documentary film, and the idea is certainly that documentary can have an “artistic” sensibility. But of those documentaries, the ones that are the most impressive artistically, the ones people respond to the most as “art” rather than just fixating on whatever issue is being explored, those were always the ones that involved the greatest amount of abstraction, either formal or conceptual. Contrast an episode of Frontline or a Michael Moore documentary with a film like Gary Tarn’s “Black Sun” or even a biographical film like “I’m Not There.” Haynes points to the world — but it wouldn’t be remotely right to call that film documentary.
I think the problem is that at some point if you collapse too much straight journalism and documentary into your definition of “art,” you end up exactly in this place where Eddie pushed back: if it’s not “about itself” in some meaningful way, why call it art? What’s WRONG with the words documentary and journalism for the stuff that points right at the world, as evidence or documentation?
“Documentary” certainly has an acknowledged place in film and photography, but you’re kind of implying it isn’t separated out at all, which I don’t see as the case in mainstream art (“high art connotations”). It’s very DIY and quite trendy to obscure the difference, but is it particularly validated by the “high art” artistic establishment? I don’t think it is at all. I attended a symposium on Robert Frank and even there, with him in the room, there was much effort expended pointing to the things that were not documentary-like, teasing what he achieved on top of his documentary sense, what sensibility and formal innovation and interpretation he added to documentary to make it art. Art’s validation of reference comes when there’s documentary plus, when there’s some abstract signification layered on top of the documentary elements that troubles the image’s relationship to reference, so that it “points to the world” in some complex and more abstract way, and the more abstract the more validated it is. (Which was the original point, that “high art culture” thrives on abstraction.)
But as we’ve said before, there are examples of everything, so I don’t question that there are exhibits that really traffic in obscuring the problems of representation and emphasizing reference as “being there.” There’s a lot of documentary film that does that too (we showed plenty of it at Silverdocs), but it just feels like dressed up journalism to me, and I can’t come up with examples of people talking about it as “art” that don’t pretty quickly move away from its documentary-ness. The journals and magazines and exhibit catalogs and statements I’ve read tend to take visual reference as a starting place and go in very abstract directions (which you do too!) If I read a piece of criticism that talked about documentary as art without really questioning the problems with framing perspective as evidence, I’d feel like something was wrong, like the critic wasn’t really up to speed or part of the conversation most art is having about art.
I think blurring that distinction leads squarely to really abominably distorted and unhelpful journalism, and I think the cause of good rigorous objective journalism is vastly more important than the limited cause of viewing documentary as Capital A Art. This idea that journalism is art is just a way of letting journalists off the hook for objectivity and artists off the hook for representational mastery. I don’t think that gesture is particularly important to visual art. I think the question of the ways in which documentary can be used in art is important to visual art, but I think artistic documentary is still pretty marginalized with respect to fiction film (etc.)
But this is precisely why illustration in the sense of “illustrating something through drawing” is somewhat unique. It’s only rarely (and problematically) documentary; it’s certainly not evidence as a photograph can be. But it is referential. It doesn’t actually point to the world directly; it points to a referent that may or may not be the world. So in that sense it does work as a sign, but not anywhere nearly as arbitrary a sign as linguistic signs.
You could probably say, following that, that a documentary photograph always follows the logic of illustration — but illustration doesn’t always follow the logic of a documentary photograph. It’s those other cases, where the illustration is not documentary but is still referential, that’s the stuff I think we’re less equipped to speak in sophisticated ways about.
re: appropriation, read this piece at Artinfo this week, march 22, about the verdict in the Patrick Cariou against Richard Prince lawsuit that went down last friday.
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/37286/french-photographer-patrick-cariou-on-his-copyright-suit-victory-against-richard-prince-and-gagosian/
“In her ruling, the judge demanded that all works and materials relating to Prince’s “Canal Zone” be “deliver[ed] up for impounding, destruction, or other disposition, as Plaintiff determines,” and that the defendants “notify in writing any current or future owners of the Paintings of whom they are or become aware that the Paintings infringe the copyright in the Photographs, that the Paintings were not lawfully made under the Copyright Act of 1976, and that the Paintings cannot lawfully be displayed.” An 11 a.m. hearing has been scheduled for May 6 to assess damages and attorney’s fees that Cariou will be due.”
Cariou: “It’s going to educate them. I don’t think it’s going to harm anyone. I don’t think artists should be offered a different standard from anyone else. When you’re 12 years old your parents tell you “Don’t steal the candy,” and we all try to apply that rule, and if you don’t people sometimes end up in jail. I’m interested in Warhol’s use of the Campbell soup can and Rauschenberg using readymade things — that I’m okay with. If it’s to steal photographs or paintings to create something, you shouldn’t be an artist in the first place. To me Richard Prince is more of an art director than an artist. I think he’s a good art director, and a great thief.”
But don’t you think illustration used to be documentary in a much more direct way *before* photography? Even as evidence, I think. I talked about this in the Cavell essay in terms of Japanese print series — they’re definitely providing a kind of witness.
And as I sort of said in that essay too (which I would link to were the site not messed up, but there you go), I think separating photographs from other art in that way is pretty problematic. Photography’s link to the world is always also contested — especially now with the ease with which photographs can be manipulated. With visual art, broadly defined (art, illustration, film, photograph) there’s always that argument; is this a part of the world? Or is this a representation of the world? Which is God’s hand and which is man’s and how do you tell the difference?
I think those issues are very interesting, and I think comics in particular has important things to say to them. I’m just in general really leery of arguments that say, “this artistic medium handles these issues this way.” That’s what Cavell does with film — his point is that film as a medium has something in particular to say about ontology. I just feel like different films say different things. Different art in galleries says different things. Different illustrators say different things.
So I would say that a documentary photograph doesn’t always follow the logic of illustration, necessarily — depends on the photograph and the context and lots of things. I feel like visual art is more apt (at this particular moment) to acknowledge the possibility of those kinds of slippages than comics is — which isn’t to say there aren’t comics artists who deal with those issues in sophisticated ways. (Yuichi Yokoyama is pretty fascinating in this regard…and so’s From Hell, come to think of it.)
And thank you for the quote Eddie. Cariou sounds really level-headed, especially considering.
I don’t know, he seems kind of hypocritical to me…
How come?
For instance, how is this different from his case? http://tinyurl.com/4vn7j8x
the difference is 48 years.
If that’s not enough of a difference, then how about this: Rauschenberg lifted news photos and made very fine collage/paint composites out of them. 48 years later we ought to be more careful and considerate. We might, for instance, ask permission. In the interim we’ve had the discourse about it, voices have been heard, and we accept that photographers have copyrights, just as comic book artists do. 48 years later Prince lifted 41 photos out of a single book by Cariou, turning each into a new work by enlarging it and daubing paint over it to a greater or lesser extent, but leaving each photo filling the ratio of its spacial dimensions as already determined by the photographer. That’s not just ‘quoting.’ Where I come from that’s called ‘taking the piss’.
I say bravo to Cariou for taking it all the way and winning. I hope he gets a bundle out of it, sells all the Prince canvases that the court has ordered to be surrendered to him and sends some of the dosh to Jamaica like he said he would. If another artist quoted panels from Graffiti Kitchen by just cutting them out and pasting them into a new work, I would be pleased to have been quoted. After all, I ‘quoted’ my fellow artists all through How to be an Artist and I have never heard that anybody objected. If somebody however nicked 41 of the 48 pages of GK, they better start putting up their dukes.
I’m with Eddie on this one. I think our draconian copyright laws are insane, and when I was doing illustration/poetry a lot of my work involved collage. But…it seems like it’s reasonable to draw some lines, and this guy appears to have crossed them, turned around, and pissed upon them. The court verdict seems pretty reasonable to me.
As always when this topic comes up, I recommend reading Jonathan Lethem’s Harpers essay from several years back.
It’s not entirely unarguable from the essay how he’d feel about this case: on the surface the piece leans toward copyleft, but I feel certain even without checking that Mr Lethem’s books are copyrighted. A standard of the “41 of 48 pages is too much” sort seems incredibly sensible.
It’s just false that documentary photography is not fine art (Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to Cariou are in galleries). There’s just something that upsets people about art being open-ended– that’s the whole reason Duchamp put a urinal in an art show to start with. But it’s a urinal in an art show– there’s nothing essentially highbrow about it (although the connotations remain highbrow, for historical reasons). My low-income minority teenage students understand Duchamp– it’s not tricky.
Still, I want to object to Caro’s idea that contemporary philosophy doesn’t address images. Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic is based on a pre-Symbolic idea of language, and the whole Lacanian Imaginary is based on images, as is a great deal of Frankfurt theory and French Situationism.
As far as Richard Prince doing stupid appropriation as art, obviously it is in fact art, it’s by a famous guy in a gallery. But it can still ba bad art. Much like alternative comics, which, like it or not, occupy much the same high-culture ghetto (and depend for validation the same visual design history) as modern visual art.
It’s not that contemporary philosophy doesn’t address images: it’s that traditional semiotics doesn’t describe the way they make meaning as accurately as it describes the way words make meaning, and any contemporary philosophy that draws heavily on semiotics has a weakness there. The space between image and referent is different from the space between word and referent — the point of the Symbolic, largely, is that words intervene. I’ll have to think to be able to articulate why Kristeva’s “semiotic” doesn’t quite do what I’m talking about — I think she’s trying to get around Saussure, but she’s still buying Lacan, who buys Saussure, so it’s a fairly small corrective. That concept is fundamentally Lacanian, and Lacan’s Imaginary situates the image prior to the break with reference that Saussure describes. The place of the instincts in Kristeva seems consistent with that to me. Lacan’s formulation is an extremely tidy way to get around the problem of image reference, but it’s more an image fetish, the image is very holistic; Lacan completely begs most of the interesting questions about illustration in the symbolic — and since I’m using the word “illustration” as Noah commented to mean images that refer, not just drawing (why isn’t drawing the word for that?), we’re squarely in the Symbolic, not that we could be otherwise. And Lacan doesn’t really allow for any meaningful structural difference between images and other signs once you’re in the Symbolic space.
My point isn’t that documentary photography isn’t art. It’s that in order to consider it so, the emphasis shifts from the documentary elements of it to other elements — ones which are more abstract, less directly “pointing at the world.” Ask someone in art WHY documentary photography is art, and they’re less likely to say “because it points to the world” than they are to say, for example, something like these three paragraphs from John Szarkowski’s Introduction to MOMA’s 1971 Evans exhibition:
The quote in the first paragraph from Kirstein makes my point explicitely in the last two sentences, photography becomes art by adding to documentary journalism a set of things-that-are-proper-to-art. Evans “abhors artiness, the substitution of aspect for fact.” Well, yes, artiness is the substitution of aspect for fact, or at least the addition of aspect to fact. And screw you if you don’t like it, Walker Evans. But in fact, you’re adding aspect anyway, so what you say doesn’t matter.
Duchamp does the same thing: he adds to the found object something proper to art, metaphor and abstraction, through the juxtaposition of the object with a context improper to it. It’s that shift from concrete to abstract that makes it something people can think of as art.
Evans abhorred artiness, just like an artist. He hung out with Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway. He had a solo show at MoMA when he was 35. And you can blame Walter Benjamin for making documentary photography art– pretty much at the dawn of documentary journalism. Cinema verite was art film waaaay before Frontline. And before that you had newsreels, but almost simultaneously you had satire like The Great Dictator and trippy high-concept stuff like Citizen Kane.
I think the relentless desire to crush fluff and folly in the name of Authentic Reality is summed up in Hegel’s “aufhebung,” or sublation (or upheaval) is all about this modern imperative to curse our blessings and shit where we sleep– the best art is no art, the best state is no state, the best God is no God.
There’s just no difficulty in discussing things that aren’t language in the context of poststructuralist nominalism– because there is no outside to language. Barthes has no problem discussing advertising imagery, Wallace Stevens uses dense images for pretty much of all of his abstruse philosophical verse, Rosalind Krauss used Lacan to talk about art and desire for decades.
One of the most amazing experiences ever was to see Charles Ray’s giant Tonka toy truck sculpture outside the MCA ten-odd years ago, with this little four-year-old clinging to it for dear life and screaming his head off as his dad and a security guard tried to pry him off. And you’ll probably tell me that the kid somehow didn’t *get* the Charles Ray piece– and I will completely disagree with you.
I think Caro’s point is maybe that there could be an outside to language — that illustration is connected to what it illustrates in a way that is less arbitrary than language. That’s sort of Cavell’s point too; that the image is of the world not referring to the world, and that that’s where it’s power comes from.
So…Wallace Stevens is very much about words. It’s words as imagery, but the point of most of his poems is the evanescence of those images; they’re arbitrary. They appear in language and disappear into language. Whereas illustration is more stable; images are real — which is why Tarkovsky can make a film like a philip k. dick novel and in tarkovsky the point is the artificial is real, pointing perhaps to god, whereas dick’s point is usually that the real is artificial (pointing perhaps to god.)
Noah! Now you’re turning against me AND using my recent jag on artificiality to boot. Big famous crashing-website high horse, I’d say.
Not that I don’t love talking about artificiality, mind you. The Tarkovsky-Dick comparison is great, since Tarkovsky is doing something of an inverse thing, as you suggest, moving from micro to macro in kind of a sublime tragic mode, and Dick tends to go macro to micro in kind of a more pathetic tragic mode. Although what that has to do with our ability to not be able to talk about it is unclear, since I don’t know why Tarkovsky would be more difficult (or abstract) to discuss than Dick, since neither of them are doing non-narrative work.
I just think that if post-structuralism is going to be employed, there should be no question that the intelligibility of images depends on historic discursive factors, regardless of to what use the images are put. But I doubt Cavell would consider himself a post-structuralist– he’s one of those Wittgensteinian analytic philosophers who police the “rule” of language, saying what philosophy can and cannot comment on, which is basically language– and that’s what Caro seems to be doing too. She thinks that language has a pretty extensive outside, which includes something as obsessively discussed as visual art.
Wallace Stevens isn’t some kind of dada beatnik New York School poet. He chooses his images like an artist– but they’re in words and in a poem, so that obviously matters. Language starts to break down only when it gets close to what I call nature. You start having to resort to extensively technical terminology and numbers. But that is not the realm of illustration and journalism.
And may I add– if there are any Marxists in the house, the idea that you can have any kind of ideological neutrality in the presentation of images is…. well, it’s ideology.
After glancing at the two early sixties just-posted Superman Bizarro stories here:
http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/2011/03/bizarro-as-kid-i-thought-bizarro-was.html
…I imagined that in Bizarro world every artist from this world has a version of themselves who smears paint on reproductions of their work and makes ninety times more money doing it.
Maybe it’s already been done. They wrote the Bizarro manifesto forty years ago:
BIZARRO CODE
Us Do Opposite of
All Earthly Things!
Us Hate Beauty!
Us Love Ugliness!
Is Big Crime To
Make Anything
Perfect On
BIZARRO WORLD!
(I think it was Jerry Siegel)
The problem isn’t the Rauschenberg. The problem is Cariou’s opinion about the Rauschenberg. If he doesn’t wish the same treatment for others (even if it may be too late for many, now) that he just received, he’s an hypocrite in my book. It’s not a problem of quantity either. If it is it’s ok to steal any painting. A painting is a single image, after all. Also: a quote is not an appropriation.
Like words, pictures and photographs are signifiers from a poststructuralist point of view. They are not “the referent” (nor closer to it) as there is no “outside the text.” For once, I both understand and agree with Bert for the most part if that’s the frame of reference—In fact, the substance of Caro’s argument eludes me a bit. As a staunch poststructuralist (or at least I have taken her to be so in previous conversations), I’m not sure how images and photography are outside the realm of that which poststructuralist theory directly applies. Barthes has an entire book on photography for instance… Caro, is your notion simply that poststructuralism treats images simply as “language” and that, insofar as images are NOT (or not directly, or not in the same way) language, perhaps this approach to it has limitations? Doesn’t W. J. T. Mitchell say something similar in Picture Theory. But you’re not claiming that images are somehow “more mimetic” are you? Just that their signifiery-ness is somehow “less arbitrary.” Is this true? Isn’t reading this :-) as a “smiling-face” just as “arbitrary” as the word “smiley-face?” Neither are “actually” smiling faces—Does the collection of keyboard strokes (and or emoticons) actually “resemble” a smiling face? Or have we just (conventionally and arbitrarily) accepted it as such (like the collection of letters in “smiley-face”)? Or am I misunderstanding you entirely?
you did know that the system would automatically turn your : and ) into an actual image, didn’t you?
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I’m sort of thinking about this in terms of our earlier discussion about metaphor. That’s what I was trying to say about Wallace Stevens. His poems are all about being metaphor; nothing in them is stable. So the bird with the feathers dangling down isn’t a bird; it’s a mind, and the mind is a bird, and both are language. What’s so beautiful/maddening/sublime/confusing about his poems is that he’s always on top of their languageness; he says things and what he says is the language itself and that turns into images which are also language.
That’s really hard to do with images, because (he says venturing foolishly into poststructural theory he doesn’t understand) images are much more metonymic than metaphoric. A picture of a chair refers to a chair because it looks like a chair, not because there’s an arbitrary linking of the word to the thing. The chair looks like a chair no matter what language you speak.
Of course, there is actually a lot of training that goes into parsing images, and image signs are certainly determined (which is why it’s so hard to convince Americans that the people in Japanese manga aren’t westerners.) But the experience of signs is more metonymic anyway, and may actually be more metonymic.
So with Tarkovsky in Solaris — the point is that what you see, the film, has a truth even if it’s false. The image of the thing is not the thing, but it’s an image, which is itself a thing and so is true. Solaris creates illusions, but the illusions are both false and a kind of platonic truth. So at the end our hero is both deceived and because of that witness to the face of God.
Whereas with Philip K. Dick and something like the three stigmata of palmer eldritch, Eldritch is this illusion which works not by obscuring the truth, but by arbitrary substitution; he’s language as virus, and essentially becomes everyone and everything by dint of saying he has become everyone and everything. There is no illusion and no truth; you take the drug (language?) and the distinction between the two crumbles apart. Which can set the ground for despair or a kind of negative theology; humility before not knowing.
So…the point is that deferral (not ideology, but deferral) seems very native to language, and somewhat less native to visual imagery. Which is actually why the context of visual art can matter less, not more. The kid looking at the overgrown tonka truck — what he gets, and is right about, is that it’s a tonka truck. It is what it appears to be.
Two things– Bizarro is really a good Hegelian, one.
Two, the kid was right about the Tonka truck being a GIANT Tonka truck. It’s a representation of a representation, and it operates on the unconscious in a profound way. Lacan said the unconscious is like a language, not that only language is connected to the unconscious.
I don’t agree with the Wittgenstein hard line between images and words. More later.
But are the only options a hard line and no line? Couldn’t there be a soft, wishy-washy line?
I’m not inclined to be democratically pragmatic about it. Especially when there’s this lurking subtext that somehow fine art, which is only images, is essentially different from illustration and journalism, which is only language. Pictures can be about words and words can be about pictures. And then there’s movies and comics and TV and theater, all of which use images and language simultaneously, and none of which are irrelevant to fine art (and vice-versa).
There’s a line in this fantastic Dell Yearling book from the ’60s that I love, called “The Teddy Bear Habit.” This kid is auditioning for the Winnie The Pooh musical and he has to sing a song called “Without A Song.” “Which,” he observes astutely, “is a pretty stupid thing to be singing when you’re singing.”
Sure, pictures are different from words, like armpits are different from algorithims. But you can have a picture of an algorithim and a sonnet about an armpit. The reason analytic philosophers are so pleased with themselves all the time is because they think that using propositional logic has made language into something that structuralism never said it was: a window on pure truth that allows you to believe in nothing. Language is an active tool, not a passive one, and it’s one that acts upon us and through us, as images connect us to strangers by alienating us from ourselves.
The chief pitfall of negative theology, I mean to say, is false humility. Lack is always a lack of something.
Lacan says that the Symbolic structures the visual field of the Imaginary– there’s no privileged cul-de-sac of pure apprehension. It’s a Buddhist myth.
Like, did I mean to miss a line break up there, or was I trying to subliminally make you think of a stretched-out starship Enterprise? You gotta squint…
Just to keep rambling, I think there’s some McLuhan “medium is the message” type essentialism happening as well– there’s a “truth” of literature which is different than that of film. I don’t see aesthetics or technology in that way.
“especially when there’s this lurking subtext that somehow fine art, which is only images, is essentially different from illustration and journalism, which is only language.”
Yeah, I don’t agree that that’s the case. I don’t think it makes sense to separate illustrations from fine art. But I think it does make sense that words and images don’t work in the same way to create meaning.
You can’t have an armpit about an algorithm, though you can have an algorithm for armpits. Comparing language to images is a metaphor; it compares two unlike things through deferral. That’s very hard to do in images, though you can show the ways language and images are parallel or alike. Which also brings up the point that Lacan is great, but not necessarily more knowledgeable than Buddhists about the way images work.
None of which is to say that images actually give you a truer hold on reality than language. Just that the way they reach for that hold, whether to miss or not, seems different.
Yeah the medium isn’t the message; the message is the message. But form has content too, surely. Even if it’s only historical (which it may be), images and language aren’t the same thing. That has to have aesthetic content.
An armpit solves a problem, like an algorithim (or a word), and defines an empty area, like a word (or an outline). When I say it you see an image, but it’s word. “Armpit.”
Buddhists and positivist analytic philosophers are not deprived of wisdom– if anything, they have a shade too much wisdom. Subtly guiding us away from delusions by inducing transparent hallucinations, like museums where you have to eventually end up in the self-evidently empty obviousness of the gift shop. Not to reference that Banksy movie I don’t really want to see, but such is the wily deferring of the metaphor…
And what about calligraphy? I know it’s a sign that becomes a symbol, but does that interfere with the free play of metaphor in languages which use Kanji characters?
Talking about images qua images is basically a way to talk about empirical perception, while talking about language qua language is a way to talk about meaning. I simply don’t think there is any need to short-circuit either, other than the highly aesthetic desire (dare I say temptation) to be ultimately self-aware, which is wisdom.
But this in and of itself is not necessarily important, true, real, or good. It’s a form of wealth, sometimes disguised as poverty. Having some knowledge about the desires that constitute our existence, our fractured subjectivity, is different, and requires ignorance along with or rather than (pardonez moi, Lacan) analysis.
Your tricky manipulation of your armpit is still a metaphor. The images I see are indeed in language; they are ephermeral. The armpit’s fire-fangled feathers make a farting noise there at the end of the mind. But they only do that in language. You can’t have a farting noise in an image; your armpit can’t have fire-fangled feathers that sound like fangled and dangled and don’t exist, though they can have feathers that are solid and as “really” there as the armpit itself.
Calligraphy is pretty interesting, as in the article I linked. If it’s used as language it’s a language — but sure, calligraphy moves language closer to the image, which has a profound effect on visual culture and arguably on approaches to meaning. It’s not an accident that Japan’s visual illustrative culture kicks ours all to hell. It’s not an accident that that image I linked thinks about words and images and images as words in a way that draws parallels and is also pretty thoughtful about the differences. And possibly it’s not an accident that iconoclasm is our thing, not Buddhisms’, and that the idea that there might be an image that doesn’t refer to the word makes some peoples of the book nervous.
I agree that ignorance can be a form of hubris. But it’s not clear to me why denying difference in the interest of infinite deferral can’t easily fit into a hubristic ignorance.
Though I agree with this:
“Talking about images qua images is basically a way to talk about empirical perception, while talking about language qua language is a way to talk about meaning. I simply don’t think there is any need to short-circuit either, other than the highly aesthetic desire (dare I say temptation) to be ultimately self-aware, which is wisdom.”
I don’t see how suggesting that images and words mean differently than each other is short-circuiting this? It seems to be validating it…?
The transformation of Eric’s symbolic smiley representation : ) transformed into actual image :) has got to have some kind of resonance to this conversation… Either that, or I just think it’s really funny.
Sorry; I think the joke’s been ruined because I finally got Derik to turn off the smileys. There’s been a popular outcry….
Well, my armpit thing only works if you grant me the conceit that “armpit” refers to something in the real actual world– in fact the real actual somatic mainframe (body) that everyone inhabits. The same could be said of the word “mind.”
Wittgenstein proposed a “picture theory” of meaning, in which statements are supposed to resemble empirical perception of the world. Which makes it odd that somatic experiences (pain, etc.) seem to push the boundaries of language. He said, “If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.”
Other than, presumably, an iteratively reprogrammable electrochemical chain reaction. Buddhism and analytic philosophy are , to me, seemingly made for robots. Except, as a firm believer in cyborg souls, i don’t really think cyborgs work that way either. The main issue is the belief that one is secretly a robot, and thus enabling the desire to reveal the robot within.
That’s the whole short-circuiting thing– that’s partially the goal in meditation, intellectually at least. Images are hallucinations, language is nonsense, suffering is illusory, everything is nothing.
But I am going to bring it back to my artificiality thing. Our minds are artificial and our bodies are natural. Images are neither– it’s how our minds deal with optical sensations. Not only apprehension but communication is inherent in that very process– the way Heidegger said that we not only hear because we have ears, but we have ears because we can hear. Language is the definitively artificial thing, and yet our bodies produce it and cover everything with it, almost like mucus.
If you want me to say that language and images are not identical concepts, I will be happy to concede that you are, definitively, linguistically, correct. But I remain suspicious of the conclusions supposedly drawn from that distinction.
I wouldn’t say the entire shimmering, vibrantly organic Japanese visual tradition kicks the Western one all to hell– our graceless art has something excessive, sloppy, self-hating about it that reminds me of my so-called life.
even the emoticon is not a real human face…I don’t think it really makes that much difference….I did think it might happen, actually…but wasn’t sure.
Of course armpit refers to something in the actual world (wherever that is!) The point is that the reference is arbitrary, not that it doesn’t exist. With images, the issue is that the reference does not in fact seem as arbitrary; it’s metonymic, not metaphoric.
Caro’s point (I think) is that the conclusions to draw from that aren’t sufficiently theorized. So being suspicious of any conclusion is probably the way to go. But it seems like a pretty important division to me, so if you’re willing to concede the division, I think it’s difficult to then go on and claim that it doesn’t matter practically.
I think lumping Buddhists and analytic philosophers together as robots seems to be a fairly violent elision of difference. Which seems funny since you’re beef with both of them seems to be what you see as their rejection of individuality.
I do love the language as secretion image though. I think you sort of win with that.
I don’t know if my problem with mechanistic solipsism is elision of individuality, exactly.
You know the concept of qualia? Like, your experience of “red” is arbitrarily connected to the word “red” (and yes, I do get structuralism 101), but it’s impossible to know that the thing you experience as “red” is the same thing someone else sees when they agree with you that, yes, the giant Tonka fire truck sculpture is “red.” That’s the ineffable specialness that causes Wittgenstein to say that you can’t say what you can show and vice-versa, and Buddhists to say that consciousness is the fundamental substrate of reality.
I insist, on the other hand, that the nature that manifests inside your mind as color perception also manifests outside your mind as the oxygen and gravity and ecology that cause you to have a mind. I object to segregating out images (and, by extension, all sensory phenomena) as objects of discussion because they are somehow illogical. It seems like a form of idealism I just can’t feel okay about.
But, as you suggest, it may be just that sort of idealism that Tarkovsky is attempting to represent. Although the fact that he’s doing it within the context of technology (space technology, film technology) is certainly something to take on in the technology of language.
Just an aside– the thing about sloppy and graceless art was not deliberately intended to refer to the work of Eddie Campbell. It’s one of those crazy deferring arbitrary things,
It’s not just elision of individuality as in personality; more like elision of difference maybe?
Also, I know you know how structuralism works better than I do — but I think talking about images tends to take you back to first principles, because structuralism doesn’t work as well for images as for words.
I don’t think the issue is that you’re creating an ineffable ideal specialness outside logic. Or at least I feel like that doesn’t have to be where you go with the idea that images work differently than language.
Tentatively, the point is that though the brain may be explicable materially, the mind isn’t necessarily. Language is mind is deferral is free will. The meaning is arbitrary, which disconnects us from the world and (perhaps) connects us to God.
Images don’t defer in quite the same way; they’re nailed down metonymically (at least to some extent). They aren’t the world but they aren’t (just) us either; they’re a cyborg simulacrum. That’s sort of what’s happening with that buddhist image I linked to, I think; it’s presenting a person-shaped hole, a nothing which demands you make it into something. For Buddhists, that’s a trap — and you can reject that idea that it’s a trap if you like, or celebrate the trapness. But I think the insight that free will is circumscribed by a world of appearances is sound. Materiality resists deferral. So you have the image of the cross.
Along those lines…I think Tarkovsky’s particular take on idealism and images has to be connected to the Russian take on icons, right?
Or maybe look at it this way…in Solaris, you create images of others, and those images have power over you. In Earthsea, you name others, and that naming gives you power over them.
I would love to see you go someplace with the Russian icon theory of Tarkovsky… that’s pretty great. It also connects to the universality in Orthodoxy, the importance of earth and the physical Absolute.
And yeah, I think that difference (and particularity) are pretty important, like a good Protestant. Language is between us and God, as you suggest, so it is a form of power. Images represent the emergence of the multiplicity of God into the world, and they do carry a mute power– the power of the idol.
I would only disagree that there is a simple equivalence between language and free will. Because language gives rise to subjectivity, which does make autonomy possible, but it also creates desire, which is sin, and slavery. That’s the deferral part, emphasized by the conservatism of Derrida, and not totally incompatible with the nihilisms I object to above.
Images bring up Plato, who we haven’t invoked yet. Images are imperfect representations of the infinite eternal, and can lead to a wee bit of Gnostic despair. Nonetheless, the long shadow of Platonic idealism is not really connected to nihilistic idealism (Wittgenstein seems not like a fan to me), but more a sort of atavistic pantheism that is a strong current in Western ideas, Christian and otherwise. The kind of serene and orderly paganism endorsed by G.K. Chesterton.
Nothing you say there really contests the idea of free will = language. You can’t have desire, sin, or slavery without free will. Free will makes all those things possible (especially sin.)
I don’t know enough about Tarkovsky or icons to say anything more useful. However, it looks like Tarkovsky actually made a film about an icon painter…
Hmm. His most famous film and the one which most people watch before moving on to his more avant-garde material. I think you’ll like it. A copy of Rublev’s Trinity can be found at the Trinity Lavra in Sergiyev Posad (a place of pilgrimage) but the original is in Moscow. A trip around the Russian Golden Ring really brings the movie alive.
I appreciate that you’re saying that language is essentially a synonym for intelligence, but I prefer the idea that the proper synonym is the unconscious, which appropriately confounds the link between language and logic.
Actually, there’s a nice online thing about different kinds of infinity– the perfect circle as sort of a Platonic ideal that can’t actually be included in a more Wittgensteiny analytic rule-based mathematics (Law, if you will). “The number exists but the curve is not ‘constructible.'”
Free will aspires toward the image, the curve that defies Law, and it operates in language. But it’s not the same thing.
The unconscious partially connects us to animals. Which is why it’s meaningful to talk about slavery and freedom in regard to animals, even if, strictly speaking, they don’t have free will because they’re not self-aware. But our connection to animals is profound.
Good God, y’all: I leave my computer in the car for a day and try to give the poor old overtaxed blog a rest and wow!
I need to read what’s here but I think Noah basically answered Eric’s question to me: I think the question of how images should be treated in post-structuralism is insufficiently theorized. The idea that they’re equivalent signs to words doesn’t seem right, but the idea that they’re not signs doesn’t work either. The arbitrariness of words is absolute, because words are abstractions. But images are not (always) abstractions, even though they are always mitigated representations. That’s why Lacan puts them in the Imaginary. So it seems to me when people talk theory about images they talk around the difference made by images being more Imaginary/concrete/direct. It’s not that I think the place we’ll end up is with an understanding of “image” that completely debunks any poststructuralist insights. It’s that I wonder if thinking poststructuralism from the position of the image wouldn’t produce additional insights that thinking it from language has not. People (like Kristeva) have tried to think poststructuralism from the Imaginary, and that work is really fascinating. But I don’t think there’s been a real systematic effort to think about the Symbolic with images at the center. And I’m very unconvinced by approaches that map Imaginary/Symbolic onto Unconscious/Conscious and Image/Word. That’s way too binary, right? The axiom is “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Where do you put images in THAT?
Well, my mantra has been — yes, it is too binary, and there’s really no problem with using language to discuss images. And Lacan, as I mention above, says that the Imaginary order is structured by the Symbolic. As far as insufficient theorization by poststructuralist heavy hitters, Derrida has a book on portraits of blind people (which Noah’s essay on ink brush drawing, linked above, ties in nicely with), Deleuze wrote about Francis Bacon, Lyotard wrote about Pollock; and it’s not like there aren’t poststructuralist elements in contemporary art theory. And we’ve done a fair amount of theorizing on this blog at some point.
I would just say, again, that this Wittgenstein idea that you can’t say what you can show is pretty problematic right next to his dictum that all logic is shown, “rules of life are dressed up in pictures.” Not that I’m claiming Wittgenstein as a poststructuralist, but he’s where you would go to get this idealistic line between empirical perception and a priori logic or constructed meaning or what have you.
I know people go to Deleuze for a lot of this — but for me it doesn’t answer the right questions. Deleuze’s best work on images is almost a return to phenomenology. Which is perfectly interesting and quite fecund, but it’s not a project that theorizes the image in classically poststructuralist terms. Deleuze is explicitely non-Saussurean. So there’s a compelling argument that Deleuze’s image theory isn’t really part of the linguistic turn but rather in opposition to it. So the question remains about the status of the image as a Saussurean sign: if it works as a Saussurean sign, but does not follow the same logic vis-a-vis reference and abstraction, then what is the lesson for images to teach Saussure (and by extension, Derrida and Lacan)? Deleuze seems happy enough for the lesson to be that Saussure is wrong and that his theory is better than Derrida and Lacan, which is all well and good, but not an answer.
Compare what Derrida wrote on images to what he wrote on language. Almost every single aspect of language was examined, and in conversation with a dozen other equally heavy hitters. Art has nothing like that. Poststructuralism in art is this hodgepodge of sources by people who are experts in linguistic philosophy writing something about images, usually image-texts rather than considering their abstract functioning as signs, as if they have exactly the same status as words.
Poststructuralism in language is a complete, and often totalizing, logical system built up from first principles. Taking those first principles and applying them unproblematically to image semiotics means you beg the question of whether the first principles are sufficient for images.
(If the problem of first principles wasn’t actually a problem, nobody would ever go back to Peirce, who is a complete waste of time, but I guess you gotta get some first principles from somewhere…)
The semiotics of art is not on as solid of a ground as linguistic semiotics, because poststructuralism is, at its kernel, a theory of inherently abstract representations. But there is a place, in Lacan, for images that are not semiotically abstract: the Imaginary before the mirror differentiation. There is no positive poststructuralist theory of representations that are less abstract: the lesser degree of abstraction is dismissed as false consciousness.
So what I think is not sufficiently accounted for is the residue in the Symbolic of those encounters with the image prior to the mirror stage. That is not accounted for in systematic theoretical terms: there isn’t even a systematic account of the post-mirror Imaginary that’s comparably elegant to Derrida’s account of the Symbolic, and the pre-mirror imaginary has been at best treated with ad hoc attention and and worst ignored. That’s just a gap in poststructuralist theory about art. It’s not a gap that means that no poststructuralist insights about art will hold water. But it is definitely a gap in the rigor of the theory itself…
Holy shit, this thread just went mental as I went and did other things. Fascinating discussion with lots to think about. I’ve perhaps made it through 2/3, but will have to wait till a more opportune moment to consider the issues more. Am in New York with no internet except at the café across the road. And I’m house-hunting…
Anyway, there are two statements by Caro that leave me rather skeptical: one, that contemporary comics show “contempt” for language. That just sounds reactionary: there’s a good number of contemporary comics makers who privilege it as much as they do images, or at least in very interesting ways, from Anke Feuchtenberger and Fabrice Neaud to Dan Clowes and Chris Ware, and of course people like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.
Two, I don’t see why art has to feel obliged in any way to accept or reject the primacy of language and why it would be a bad thing if it didn’t. That’s hegemonic thinking, and positing an alternative isn’t to reject all of 20th-century literature or anything like that, in my book.
Deleuze’s writing on Bacon is basically about a figure (a subject) being subsumed by force (virtuality), which is what his philosophy is about. You can’t blame a philosopher of duck-ism for looking at everything and seeing a duck, but it hardly makes the signifying of the painting more phenomenological than his writing on Kafka or Bergson. Or on film, which is what allows him to talk about time, and illustrate his conclusions fairly clearly.
Certainly most philosophers have written more about writing than anything else. But the question remains– is there an outside to language? Because in poststructuralism, I don’t think there really is, which makes it odd to say that something is outside of its purview (as currently theorized).
This was all about trying to defend Noah using fine art as a tool in discussing illustration, and the lack of attention to the Imaginary in Lacan (which I’ll grant you, although it’s pretty important for what he says on religion) is hardly a reason to say that illustration and fine art are too different to be discussed in the same paragraph, especially compared to illustration and, say, philosophy or literature.
I did say “few” cartoonists, not “only” cartoonist! But the origin of my statement is in the fact that so many people will say that comics is a visual medium, period. Which DOES get said, in those terms, all over the place. And I understand why, but it ends up amounting to a contempt for writing, because so many cartoonists think that understanding writing — and especially literature — isn’t an important part of being a cartoonist, that good images somehow make up for not paying attention to writing and literature.
You can see that at work in those situations where Noah will ding some comic for being banal in its storytelling or conceptual elements, and everybody jumps on him about how he’s not paying attention to the images, but then the description of what the images do is still banal and conventional and everybody’s all “ooh, but he did it with pictures.” Yeah…not the point. But it’s ALWAYS what happens when literary people observe that comics doesn’t often sail over the conceptual bar established by, say, our Booker prize winners, and it’s a rejoinder that misses the point of that criticism.
Art theory is of course allowed to have strands that ignore the linguistic turn. Ignoring the importance of the linguistic turn to 20th century literature, though, is problematic; there are elements of 20th century fiction where it’s less important, but art literature’s pretty much been in bed with the turn and its antecedents since the nineteen-teens. There’s nothing hegemonic about keeping art on the hook for participating in a conversation that it to no small extent started. It’s only hegemonic to say that’s the only conversation art should have, which certainly it isn’t.
My problem with the alternatives is that the alternatives aren’t actually talking about the same thing. In general, with the exception of someone like Krauss (who really isn’t an alternative), the alternatives just don’t get at the things that make literature drawing on the turn so interesting. So they’re not actually alternative theories offering different answers to the questions I’m interested in, they’re just completely different theories about different questions. Positing an alternative is so often just a way of begging the question.
Yeah…and of course Bert tried to defend me and then I turned on him. No friends in the comments!
There are two issues for me, is the thing. I don’t think separating illustration from fine art makes sense in any kind of ontological fashion. That is, there are historical difference and cultural differences maybe, at different times (though these are blurry too) but I don’t see how those differences themselves constitute any particular challenge to post-structuralism. Comics are sometimes devalued in relation to fine art and sometimes they’re really not particularly, but whether they are or no, it seems to me, has to do with historical and cultural issues, not with the fact that comics or illustration has a different way of making meaning than the visual art tradition in general.
On the other hand…I think there is a legitimate question about whether images (whether paintings or drawings or photographs or film) function differently from language. It seems like there is an outside there to language — though not necessarily to the symbolic (to the extent that I ever have any idea what I’m talking about when I’m talking about Lacan, which is not to a great extent.)
And, quickly- has anyone read Ranciere on visual art? He talks a lot about this Platonic idea of theatricality (different from Michael Fried’s theatricality), but also typography– you could say he actually sees illustration as perhaps the defining art form of modernism.
Okay; need to leave but here’s my overly simplistic binary for the day.
I think one of the big differences between image/word in terms of art is that images tend to start from a baseline of asking ontological questions while language tends to start from a baseline of asking epistemological questions.
I think (possibly because of the undertheorization Caro talks about?) that can easily slip into saying, as Cavell sort of does, that image art is more real, or more connected to the real. I don’t think that’s exactly right, or not right in a way that has the force that Cavell wants it to have. But I think that Cavell’s right in saying that images point to the real insistently — they think about being first, often as a path to thinking about knowledge. Whereas someone like Wallace Stevens thinks about knowledge as a path to thinking about being.
And my undertheorized binary would be study versus meditation. If one accepts the Word as primary, as Christians do, you’re pretty much deciding that the chicken, of adult knowing and saying, came before the egg of protean undifferentiated libidinal charges, a la Deleuze. So it’s not that study is inferior or posterior to meditation, but they are linked– meditation on the image of the Word (for Christians this could be gazing at an icon, or a cross or image of the Virgin, but it could also be a practice, like contemplating a passage of Scripture or using the rosary) is a practice caught up with theory, which is interrogation, hermeneutics, etc. And “the linguistic turn” in art, from conceptual art to ritualized performance to institutional critique to relational practices of archiving and facilitating, has seemed to move art into theory and away from practice– but it has also had the opposite effect of making theory itself an object of contemplation.
Ranciere says, “Romanticism declared that the becoming-sensible of all thought and the becoming-thought of all sensible materiality was the goal of the very activity of thought in general.” And, “The Romantic Age actually plunged language into the materiality of the traits by which the historical and social world becomes visible to itself, be it in the form of the silent language of things or the coded language of images.” This brings us to the aesthetic regime of the arts, in which disciplinary distinctions and hierarchies are effectively dissolved– art is no longer a way of doing or producing or judging, but a way of seeing or recognizing or contemplating.
Modernist utopia comes along, and presents this autonomist myth that images need not represent, tones need not harmonize, words need not signify, but purity is violated by its own underlying hybridity, and this orthodoxy pretty much collapses under its own weight. Which ends us up with this: “Postmodernism thus became the grand threnody of the unrepresntable/intractable/irredeemable, denouncing the modern madness of the idea of a self-emancipation of mankind’s humanity and its inevitable and interminable culmination in the death camps.” Which brings up Agamben’s questions about interpretation being possible now that we’re all just walking corpses.
Anyhow, as regards illustration, here’s that thing: “(T)he ground was laid for painting’s ‘anti-representative revolution’ was laid… in the way typography, posters, and the decorative arts became interlaced… It is the flatness of an interface.”
So, pace Ranciere, the regime, the conditions for recognizing Stevens as meaningful and Picasso as beautiful are fundamentally linked. Books are burned as representations of immanent ideas, idols are smashed as representations of transcendent beliefs, but the purity being preserved by those distinctions can lead to a slippery slope.
I mostly agree with what Noah is saying in his last comment. I think, to Bert’s point, there is something in poststructuralism that’s outside language, insofar as Lacan is poststructuralist — the Real is outside language. That’s why encounters with the Real are traumatic: language structures identity, so things that are outside language cause these ruptures in identity.
But I’m not trying to say that images are outside language: I’m trying to say that our understanding of how images work in that language-organized Symbolic, how they work “as language”, is less systematic than our understanding of how words work. It’s too easy to equate “language” with “words” — but poststructuralism doesn’t. So I agree with everybody who has pointed that out, that images fit into that system. Image as inhabiting the interface with the real is pretty well-theorized stuff though, in psychoanalytic poststructuralism. Bert’s right about that.
But there’s no such thing as a systematic “linguistics of the image” that’s comparable to what the discipline of linguistics has come up with for words. And most poststructuralist theory relies on that linguistic understanding of “language.” It’s not really saying anything shocking to point out that in linguistics, the verbal sign has been given priority throughout the decades of theorization, and it’s not a simple matter to shift the priority so that the image sign gets more attention — or to recast poststructuralism so that it relies less meaningfully on linguistics. I don’t accept the idea that verbal and visual linguistic logics are completely identical. There is probably a great deal more overlap than many image-centric people will admit to, but they’re not identical. I think the differences are in need of more thorough and systematic theorization.
I think this is ultimately consistent with Noah’s point that images are ontological rather than epistemological. One of the things poststructuralism does is assert that epistemology IS ontology, but it’s much tidier to explain why that is the case when you’re looking at words than when you’re looking at images.
“Art theory is of course allowed to have strands that ignore the linguistic turn. Ignoring the importance of the linguistic turn to 20th century literature, though, is problematic; there are elements of 20th century fiction where it’s less important, but art literature’s pretty much been in bed with the turn and its antecedents since the nineteen-teens….
My problem with the alternatives is that the alternatives aren’t actually talking about the same thing. In general, with the exception of someone like Krauss (who really isn’t an alternative), the alternatives just don’t get at the things that make literature drawing on the turn so interesting. ”
Okay, I will just punt here, Caro. What? Literature drawing on the linguistic turn– like Calvino and Barth and David Foster Wallace? Does that include Joyce and Kafka and Faulkner and Woolf? And that’s objectively more interesting than art like– Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, Lawrence Weiner, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Liam Gillick? Are we going back to Duchamp and Piero Manzoni and Max Ernst? Or are you saying that literary criticism based on Saussure (Derrida) is better than art criticism based on Saussure (Hal Foster)? And why doesn’t Rosalind Krauss count? How about Susan Sontag? How about Claire Bishop or Robert Pincus-Witten?
As I said, I accept that there is a functional difference in the use of images and text, which relates to the thing I said earlier about qualia, but not essential enough to mourn the unreadability of art. Why couldn’t you be the one to theorize these first principles whose absence invalidates the writing and artwork of all these poor saps?
Bert…Caro didn’t say objectively more interesting I don’t think. She said more interesting to her. And I don’t think she said it invalidated anything…? Not sure where that’s coming from.
And…she’s sort of working on theorizing them! Stuff’s hard though, especially (as you know) when you don’t really have academic institutional support, i.e., somebody funding your time.
And why is it that comics couldn’t be discussed on the basis of theories that have affected visual art more directly than literary criticism– like, Frankfurt School stuff, or Situationism? Commodity fetishes and spectacles aren’t my thing always, but they certainly can be applied to comics. Or the entire corpus of film criticism? Noah has written some pretty great stuff inspired by Laura Mulvey.
I just don’t know what’s at stake. I’m happy to read a grammatology of neo-minimalism, but do we need that to use fine art to talk about comics? Or any medium other than literature?
And, by “theorize,” Caro, I don’t mean “write a book.” You’re buying a house, and Heaven knows what else with your time. But we’re theorizing here, and I’m not afraid to spout all sorts of half-baked things. I guess you and Noah have an agreement about images being ontological and text epistemological– your enemy would appear to be the “epistemic fallacy,” but it might also be Immanuel Kant.
I get that you hate Peirce, but what does that mean for comics?
All right; fine. I’m going to try to write a post about illustrating Wallace Stevens. That’ll make you sorry.
OK, so there was this thread a few months ago where I brought up Krauss — whom I adore, probably more than almost any other academic writer period ever — and Matthias said, in so many words, that she was too linguistic for him. So she “doesn’t count” for this project of thinking through the limits of the linguistic approach to art from a poststructuralist standpoint because the snazziest art historian I know has classified her as linguistic. But also because I kind of agree with him; she — and Hal Foster, who is the same general school of art theory — are very up on the linguistic turn and interested in its implications for art. But there is so clearly a distinction between the kind of insights about art that inspire Matthias and the ones that inspire Krauss, and so the question is whether the kinds of insights that inspire Matthias can be thought at all from within the framework Krauss is using. Is there a way of reading art the way Krauss does, asking and answering the questions that inform her work and readings, but deploying evidence tied to the image in a way that does not trigger Matthias’ now-emblematic “that’s too literary!”? (Sorry, Matthias, you have become a sign.)
I would say Duchamp and Ernst are squarely part of the linguistic turn — that’s part of what I was getting at when I said art started the conversation. Certainly Magritte — the pipe/not pipe is a perfectly good illustration of Saussure.
Maybe Matthias can elaborate on why he doesn’t find Krauss that interesting. It occurs to me I don’t know what he thinks of Duchamp…
My point is that I’d be hard pressed to think of any 20th century literature that gets studied in literature departments (as opposed to “fiction” which gets studied in writing departments) that doesn’t have some engagement with the linguistic turn — literature and Continental philosophy have been holding hands and skipping since the days of Bergson and Apollinaire…
And comics CAN be discussed from any of those frameworks you mention. I’m only speaking of a — really very small in the grand scheme of things! — gap in the way we talk about comics, or art period, from within poststructuralism, probably even mostly from within psychoanalytic poststructuralism, as I’d probably be willing to hazard the guess that it’s not a problem, really probably, if you’re using Deleuze. Just for using Derrida and especially Lacan and the French feminists…It’s not a problem for talking about comics period. It’s a problem for talking about comics from this particular theoretical perspective.
The best I can hope for is that dissing Peirce will somehow work against Scott McCloud. Holy God that stuff is pedestrian.
Noah, you could also maybe write a post actually illustrating Wallace Stevens. That could be cool.
Somebody really should do a comic of that Delillo passage I quoted in my piece, really somebody should.
Way ahead of you Caro. I illustrated a Wallace Stevens poem…eight years ago now maybe?
Um…. Noah made a zine actually illustrating Wallace Stevens.
Well, you want a Lacanian treatment of art, there’s a pretty significant amount of writing on the “gaze” by feminists– I took a class.
We can all try to work on a Lacanian reading of some crappy comic sometime. It’s a plan.
Aw crap! Noah posted the thing about his zine before I did. Anyway, I still feel smug.
I should point out that there were like 50 copies of that zine or less; it’s not like anyone should know about it but me and people like Bert who knew me when I made it.
Just saying, it is humorous that you are the one who told me that Wallace Stevens’ imagery defies illustration.
Whew, I finally managed to read through the rest of this discussion, and now it has kind of petered out, plus I’m not sure I’ve been equally attentive to all the interesting questions raised, but I will say this in response to Caro’s flattering signing of me:
I don’t dislike Krauss; in fact I think some of her work is pretty great, but yes, I have at times found her uneccessarily laborious, caught up in linguistic issues that may have been relevant at the time, but now just get in the way of her otherwise good observations.
Is there a way of applying her method to less obviously linguistic insights in visual art? Probably, but my point all along has been: why is that so important?
Caro, you have a real preference for whatever theoretical insights any given work of art may give you, and I am not at all opposed to that — I find that stuff as fascinating as the next man, BUT there are so many other equally valid and compelling ways of experiencing and talking about art, ways that you can frame in exact theoretical terms, but which to my mind don’t necessarily benefit from it.
Art isn’t theory.
Amen.
Well, Matthias, I believe I still owe Franklin Einspruch an essay on the merits of her method — fortunately Krauss has mostly answered it for me as she talks about method a lot! :)
I remember that you’ve made this same basic argument before with regards to literature itself — in the same way that art isn’t theory, comics aren’t literature, and so on and so forth. It’s a sort of medium-specificity that insists on boundaries — and while I GET it, I think those boundaries may be more limiting than they are valuable, for any purposes other than pedagogical.
For my own purposes, as you say, there’s certainly an aesthetic preference at work here — but there’s also an aesthetic agenda for those boundaries to become more permeable. Not permeable so that there’s no possibility of ever deploying the distinction to good effect, but permeable so that there’s more possibility of deploying the mixture to good effect. It’s partly, as I think we’ve discussed, the fact that theory isn’t a “way of experiencing and talking about art” it’s a way of experiencing and talking about the world — one to which visual art has yet to make its fully evolved contribution. I believe that’s a contribution that needs to be made, considering the impact and reach of theoretical vantage points not only for “talking about art” but also for talking about all kinds of other things, including politics, and identity, and the politics of identity. If the vantage point of art is insufficiently represented there, that is an exclusion — even if it is one that’s largely self-inflicted. Participating in that conversation should in no way prevent all the other ways from experiencing and thinking about art from continuing on apace, as not everybody will be inspired by theory in the same way that not everybody is inspired by aesthetics. Surely there’s room for all of the above?
But it’s also that such an engagement with language/linguistics/literature in particular is more important for comics and important in a different way than it is for visual art. It becomes, to me, a question of broadening the field of comics sub-genres — in English-language comics, at least, currently there are a) a couple of unique genres, the fully visual-narrative and visual-metaphorical ones; b) the comics versions of genre fiction, SF, romance and heroic stories; c) plenty of autobiography and memoir; d) biography; e) journalism; f) children’s stories. Then, there are those few cases that qualify as literary short stories (although those trend toward the visual-narrative and visual-metaphorical genres, for various reasons many of which, I think, are subcultural). There are also a handful of experimental comics (which, as you know, I’m extremely fond of, but that is a very new and nascent genre.)
But there’s very little in comics that’s comparable to — let’s call it “Booker fiction,” the kind of fiction that gets nominated for and wins the Booker prize. (Although Booker books are not really homogeneous and my bias against current American letters is showing; “Pulitzer fiction” just suggests a somewhat different scope and approach to me.) Booker fiction is very engaged with theory — not just contemporary theory but traditional poetics. It also tends to care deeply about literary aesthetics and a range of pleasures that come from prose.
You’ll probably come back with the argument — as you have before — that Booker fiction is a literary genre and that comics doesn’t need to model itself on something so outside. But the question “why shouldn’t it take that genre as a model?” is equally valid. There’s no consistent argument that Booker fiction shouldn’t serve as a model for comics — unless comics is also going to reject all the other literary genres right along with it: popular genre fiction, the literary short story, biography, memoir…
I find the possibility of comics engagement with fiction at the Booker level especially compelling considering that Booker fiction’s engagement with theory and form — both questions and the mechanisms for getting at those questions — is at a point where it needs fertile new terrain, and “the illustrated book” is extraordinarily fertile. Books like Fate of the Artist point in that direction for me, and I think it’s tremendously inspiring. It’s a different direction from the one folks like Craghead and Overby are exploring, and — as marginal as experimental comics is — truly ambitious, truly literary comics are vastly more rare.
At this point, though, I generally have the sense that there are several pressures working against comics producing a work that’s really truly comparable in scope and ambition to a Booker novel. The biggest obstacle is auteurism and the DIY insistence on self-expression, which lead people who don’t have a lot of literary background to resist collaborations drawing on varied expertise (the kind of fecund collaboration, for example, that Anke F. has with Katrin de Vries). Hipster ennui — that classic mix of self-importance with complete and utter lack of seriousness — saturates art comics culture and generates a contempt for complexity and intensity that works against any meaningful engagement with literature. (The hipster problem also severely damages American prose letters; I should link back to that discussion on the London Review of Books essay here.) Hipster-fic generally ends up being either irony or what Mike called “me-comics”.
But I also don’t think we should discount the role of disciplinary distinctions here. Art education plays into this as I’ve mentioned before: because English is more valued at the middle and high school level than art, literary people often have much less drawing training than art people have in writing. But this can also lead to a lack of understanding among art people about the differences in the way a trained literary reader will approach, say “The Fortress of Solitude” from the way that same reader will approach “Midnight’s Children”, or the fiction of, say, Umberto Eco. It’s a failure of American education that we don’t equip our students to read those books the way they’re meant to be read before the time when students have to specialize, so that those reading protocols are such specialized protocols. But it nonetheless remains true that those books do demand reading protocols that only highly trained readers have — most people writing comics and writing about comics, even the best writers in comics, aren’t highly trained readers. There are precious few people in art comics who are palpably sophisticated readers by the standards of fiction readers — because a lot of those protocols just don’t get taught until graduate-level courses in literature.
Similarly, the academic art world sometimes seems hermetically sealed: unlike literature departments which (at the graduate level) embraced their “cultural studies” sister departments to the point that traditional literature almost vanished entirely, the “department of art” is very separate — methodologically and institutionally — from departments of visual culture (which tend to be, really, part of that greater diaspora of literature).
But this idea that the disciplines are separate becomes a problem for comics. One response has been to claim comics exceptionalism — the only discipline you need to know anything about is comics themselves. But that’s obviously bullshit: comics scholars tend to know art or they tend to know literature, and each enriches their insights in different ways. This is why I brought up Noah’s oft-expressed annoyance at the banal content of many comics: it’s just exasperating to hear people make “literary” claims for a book like Asterios Polyp. It’s a perfectly good pedagogical tool and an interesting experiment in visual device, but by the most sophisticated contemporary standards applied to literature, it’s pretty run-of-the-mill fiction. It’s equally exasperating to read comics criticism that examines a really pedestrian, obvious narrative, something that’s really intended for diversion and fun, in lofty formalist, new critical terms — the type of review that explicates literary devices which are completely on the surface of the work. It’s like someone writing a piece of student criticism about a student essay. It doesn’t happen in prose book reviews. The expectation is that people who read Bookforum understand literature and you don’t have to spell out the devices at work in the book. (And of course, here I’m talking about the semi-professional comics critics, not random people writing about books they love or ate on their personal blogs.)
Most of the writing in and about comics is — at its absolute best — BFA-level writing. And I’m not talking about prose-craft — I’m talking about the sophistication of the engagement with ideas.
When claims are made about comics-as-literature, the impression is that comics people don’t know anything about literature, let alone theory. But the bias against theory seems to be part and parcel of this dual belief that literature and literary structure basically work the same way that art does but just in a different medium, and that what you learned in college is all there is to know about literature. That’s a misperception due almost entirely to these overly-strict boundaries. I do think it’s extremely important for comics that those walls come down.
Caro damn it…when you find yourself writing a 1000 word comment…write it as a post instead!
I may just turn this into a post. That’ll show you….
It’s actually about 1450 words. :| I thought about it and decided maybe it was too geeky and inside baseball for our suddenly stylish tone! Also I didn’t wanna bump Jones’ excellent feminist post. I can make it a post but lets give his some time in the sun first…
So, after all of this, has Eddie done any work on deferral (for anyone other than himself) in Australia since moving to Australia?